Troubleshooting promotion process errors

Diagnosing an issue

The promote step pushes all the staging form records that are valid, either automatically or manually, to their respective target forms within the ITSM applications, based on the option selected for each promote step within the job.
Each promote step represents a data promotion for one staging form. This data must be validated without errors before it can be promoted in the validation step.

If you select the Create Only mode for the validate step, the related promote step creates new records only in the target forms. If you do not select the Create Only mode, the new records are created in the target forms and the existing records are updated.

If an article has multiple versions and the newest version is in a Draft state, the article with a version that is earlier than the newest version is promoted with a Published state. When articles with multiple versions are promoted, if the newest version is in the Published state, all the articles with a version earlier than the newest version are promoted in a Closed state.

Read the following topics related to the promote step:

• License-validation-during-a-data-load-job
• Propagation
• Best-practice-for-normalizing-and-reconciling-ITSM-data-loaded-through-Data-Management
• Loading-Foundation-data-by-using-Data-Management

Check for promotion step errors in the following locations:

• Error Management console—Errors found on the staging forms are flagged.
  For details about fixing errors, see Managing-data-errors-from-data-load-jobs.
• ARerror.log—This log file lists errors that occur during validation and promotion.
• CAI Events form—Search for records with Return Code set to Error. The comments in Return Message indicate which error occurred.

Troubleshooting errors related to the promotion step stuck in the In Progress state

Issue symptom

The promote step stays in the In Progress state.

Issue scope

This issue occurs in the promote step of a dataload job. This issue may occur due to one of the following causes:

• Custom fields and selection of menu values in the target form are not mapped in the load form and in the job.
• Custom workflow on load forms are not coded properly.
• For bulk data loads, there are not enough threads to run the job along with other processes running on the server, such as escalations.
• Null values are mapped and pushed for fields that need a value.

Resolution

• For unique index errors, usually no action is required if this is the only error.
• For timeout errors (ARERR 92 and 93), since there are no retries in Unified Data Management (UDM), check the time and why the process timed out. Reload the data in a new job.

• See ITSM Troubleshooting DMT UDM Promote issues KA000163487 on BMC communities.

Troubleshooting BMC Helix ITSM server or plug-in errors in the promote step

Issue symptom

The system captures all BMC Helix ITSM server or plug-in errors that occur when the promote step is created for a job. Such errors are captured and displayed on the Promote step in the steps panel in a job record as a detailed error message.

Issue scope

This issue occurs in the promote step of a dataload job. If any BMC Helix ITSM server or plug-in error occurs when data is being promoted in chunks to the target forms, the system processes the data chunk only up to the point of error. The remaining data in the chunk is not processed. The system then proceeds to promote the data in next chunk. The Promote step is completed with Status as Completed and Job Result as Errors Detected.

Resolution

The system administrator must first resolve the errors, export the data that was not promoted to a format of Data Management spreadsheets, and create a new job to promote the data.

For information about creating a new job see Creating-a-data-load-job. For information about running a new job, see Running-and-monitoring-data-load-jobs.

Resolutions for common errors

The following table lists the common errors and their workaround: