Use Case: Service Orchestration & Automated Remediation

This use case describes the mechanisms for incorporating automated and manual remediation in a standard Automic Automation process: An application generates a data file on one system. The file is subsequently transferred to a remote system by means of a File Transfer. This process suffers chronic failures caused by systemic disk space issues on the target file system. For this reason, the Workflow showcased here includes built-in remediation and subsequent transfer reattempts. Ultimately, automated remediation fails, which leads to human intervention managed in ServiceNow.

The Workflow uses simple objects like Promptsets, Filters and Notifications, reflecting the simplistic nature of Automic Automation's methods. Automated remediation is a specialty in its own right and can range from the very basic (like our Workflow) to the highly sophisticated. Advanced automated remediation will undoubtedly entail a host of objects (Includes, Events), scripted procedures and third-party products to monitor executions, trap errors and execute restarts. Given the limited scope of this use case, we focus on simple processes and ServiceNow.

Prerequisites: You should be familiar with Workflows, Jobs, Filters, PromptSets and Notifications, as well as Action Packs.

This is a short summary of the content of this use case:

1. Common Elements

   This module/video explains the purpose of the use case and describes the Workflow in detail: A data file is generated on one system and transferred via a File Transfer (JOBF) to another system. The use case simulates disk space issues disrupting a successful JOBF with dummy jobs, leading to three separate submission reattempts. The first two remediation paths are automated. The third, and last resort attempt, relies on ServiceNow and human intervention.

2. Workflow with Built-In Remediation

   This module/video describes how to build the Workflow. It goes into the details configured in the following objects:

   1. Variables

   2. PromptSets

   3. Filter and Output Scan setting in the JOBF

   4. Notifications

   5. Workflow that creates files, one of them leads to the space issue, and triggers the File Transfer. The File Transfer is configured with Output-Scan parameters that scans for "insufficient space" and sets the JOBF Monitoring status to a more meaningful one for this particular situation.

   6. The ServiceNow Action Pack.

3. The ServiceNow Package

   This module/video explains the integration, it shows how to download and install the ServiceNow Action package.

4. Understanding the ServiceNow Action Pack

   This module/video describes the technical and functional structure of the ServiceNow Action Pack. It outlines the structure of the Workflows, Jobs and PromptSets that it contains.

5. Incidents

   The previous modules/videos have explained the use case, the Workflow and the ServiceNow integration. From now on, the use case explains how to create and configure the Workflow using the installed Actions from the ServiceNow Action Pack. This module/video focuses on the Create Incident sub-Workflow. It shows how to create it and how, when executed, the Workflow creates an Incident in ServiceNow.

6. Change Requests

   This module/video focuses on the Change Requests sub-Workflow from the Action Pack. It demonstrates what happens in ServiceNow and in Automic Automation when it executes and shows the execution details in the Process Monitoring perspective and on the report.

7. CMDB Actions

   This module/video explains how Automic Automation automates CMDB actions in ServiceNow.

8. Executing the Use Case Workflow

   This module/video demonstrates the main Workflow: It shows what happens in Automic Automation and in ServiceNow when we execute it.

9. Operations Support

   This module/video focuses on three capabilities to support operations: Custom Dashboards, User Catalog and AAI.