Incident Management Timeouts and Escalations Fails to Process Messages Despite Being Configured Correctly

In Workflow or ServiceDesk, when tasks are created, corresponding "messages" are generated that denote the trigger time, for the tasks to be activated.  For all task-related Servicedesk and Workflow processes, a worker process regularly queries the message bus to determine if any "timeout or escalation" has occured, meaning that a trigger time has been reached for a task to be activated. 

There have been situations where for some reason, those messages that should be processing are not. While is is possible that many different things can cause this issue, this article specifically addresses an issue where a broken message is clogging the pipe, preventing any other messages from being processed. This assumes that you correctly have background processing installed, and that "Do Not Process Timeouts and Escalations" is not selected in Local Machine Info Editor.

This issue includes messages of several types that are not being processed, including:
1. Task messages are not timing out properly.
2. Messages sent to the WorkflowResponseQueue are not being processed.

Workflow and Servicedesk

 No errors are displayed

 There are several possible causes for messages not being processed. The most common causes are:

1. "Do Not Process Timeouts and Escalations" is selected in LocalMachineInfoEditor.
2. The web.config file of the problem workflow has an entry '<workflow runTimeoutsAndescalations="false" '
3. Background Processing is not installed on your Workflow Server.

A less common problem is the fourth potential cause:

4. There is one or more corrupt messages in either the Messages table or the WorkflowResponseQueue clogging the pipe, preventing other messages from processing.

 After confirming causes 1-3 are configured correctly, there are two places to look to address the issue.

First, emptying the WorkflowResponseQueue can remove any problems with messages in the WorkflowResponseQueue. To do this, perform the following steps:

1. On your Workflow/ServiceDesk Server, navigate to "%\Program Files\Symantec\Workflow\Data\MQWorkflowFileStorage\localworkflowfilestorage-workflowresponsequeue\"
2. Copy all the files in the queue to a new location, I recommend creating a backup folder one level up.
3. Delete all the files in the queue.
4. Restart the Symantec Workflow Server Service and IIS.

If the steps above does not resolve the issue, the problem likely resides in your messages table. To look further into this problem, please create a support case with Symantec Technical Support and we will be able to assist with identifying and deleting any problem message.  It will be required to have access to your SQL server, or SQL Management Studio that can connect to your SQL server. 

Due to the potential data corruption that could occur when working in the SQL databases, especially with the Messages table, the SQL queries used to identify and delete these messages can be provided by Symantec Support, and are best used by a Symantec Engineer.  Please mention to the attending engineer that the internal notes for this article have the related queries.