Who is this article for?

IT Administrators finding that the Robot service is in a stopped state after a server reboot.

Services app access is required.

The Robot service is configured to start automatically at server start, but you might find that after a server restart, the service is in the stopped state.

This article explains what causes the issue and how to resolve it.

1. Issue

The Robot service is configured to start automatically.  After a server reboots, the Robot service will start and connect to the main application service.  If the main service cannot start then the Robot will stop.

This normally happens where IIS and SQL Server are running on the same machine, and the SQL Server service is not ready to accept connections when the main service tries to log in.

The symptoms are as follows:

• You find a correctly configured Robot service is in the stopped state.
• The Robot service log shows the startup tests failed, in conjunction with "(500) Internal Server Error".
• At the same timestamp, the PentanaTngService log shows:

A network-related or instance-specific error occurred while establishing a connection to SQL Server

• At the same timestamp, the SQL Server error log shows messages such as:

SQL Server is not ready to accept new client connections. Wait a few minutes before trying again

• The service log might also contain the error:

Login failed for user '[domain]\[user]'. Reason: Failed to open the explicitly specified database '[Retain Database]'. [CLIENT: 127.0.0.1]

2. Solution

To resolve this problem, set the Robot service start to Automatic (Delayed Start).