About Service Orchestration

Service orchestration is the automated coordination of processes that span multiple domains or applications and may also include manual steps, such as human approval or intervention, to provide a service. At the heart of service orchestration is the Workflow. The overall process typically involves multiple Workflows for individual tasks. Nevertheless, one main Workflow orchestrates the tasks across the entire infrastructure. With a core strength in workload automation, coupled with extensive integration options, Automic Automation offers everything to implement any service orchestration scenario in your existing IT landscape.

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Why Service Orchestration?

IT is deeply embedded in every business enterprise. Everyone needs to work with IT tools and in IT infrastructures, not just the people in the IT industry. When a server goes down, business activities can come to a complete standstill. This makes providing IT services in the most efficient, reliable, and accessible way essential to keeping a business going.

At the same time, the variety of applications and components that your users need to do their work and your infrastructure needs to support your users continues to increase. Managing services across this vast, diverse and shifting IT landscape is complex, making service orchestration a necessity.With automated processes that can manage tasks and data over any IT landscape, you gain efficiency and reliability in all the predictable areas. You can provide services, incident remediation, and proactive systems maintenance at any scale and in an automated, controlled and repeatable way—and all this in your existing IT landscape.

Examples of Services

Because IT is deeply embedded in the daily operations of any enterprise, the list of the types of services that users need is long. These can range from the small and simple to the enormous and complex. The following is a sample of typical IT services that are also good candidates for service orchestration:

  • Giving a user access to a server, repository, or application
  • Deployment of a multi-tier server
  • Employee onboarding, and employee offboarding
  • Closed loop remediations to head off critical disk-space shortages
  • Disaster recovery
  • Financial close over diverse business units
  • Providing self-service offerings from a service catalog

Delivering these services require orchestration of provisioning, updating, de-provisioning components across business, application and infrastructure layers.

Benefits of Service Orchestration

By automating service fulfillment processes, you can coordinate tasks that touch multiple departments and components to gain many advantages over a traditional, manual approach. Automic Automation provides you with the tools and power to realistically leverage all these advantages for your organization. The following are the main benefits of service orchestration:

Coordination and control

Orchestration provides improved coordination and control of service deliveries by enabling the following:

  • Fully orchestrated service delivery across business, application, and infrastructure layers
  • A single point of control for even the most expansive use cases, such as a full-stack service delivery
  • A means to bridge organizational and IT silos to provide a common service

Reliability

Automation ensures reliable service fulfillment by doing the following:

  • Eliminating problems caused by human error
  • Providing proven, predictable service delivery to ensure that service levels are achieved
  • Ensuring compliance with business and security standards
  • Supporting the adoption of best practices across the entire operation

Efficiency

Service orchestration provides efficiency by doing the following:

  • Eliminating the time lags between tasks caused by handoffs from one system or department to another
  • Ensuring that all necessary information is passed on to the next step accurately and reliably
  • Providing timely initial responses to fulfillment and remediation requests
  • Freeing up support staff from routine tasks to work on complex and unique issues

Transparency

Orchestrating service delivery with Automic Automation Workflows supports transparency of your executions by enabling you to do the following:

  • Follow the progress of the service fulfillment job from Process Monitoring
  • Report progress from the Workflow to the request ticket
  • Have detailed records for auditing and for continuous improvement analysis

Scalability and flexibility

With Automic Automation, you are well positioned to fulfill a broad service management strategy because Automic Automation provides exceptional scalability and flexibility in the following ways.

  • The modularity of the object-oriented Workflow enables you to create reusable, tested building blocks for further service fulfillment workflows as you move towards optimal service management across the whole organization.
  • Once you have proven a service fulfillment Workflow in one Automic Automation client, you can roll it out to all business units and locations.
  • The backend Automation Engine offers the processing power to handle enormous scale (100,000+ connected servers and millions of executed tasks within one instance) without compromising performance.
  • The integrations enable you to provide service fulfillment across all platform types, whether on-premise, cloud, or hybrid.

Continuous improvement

The Automic Automation features that provide the other benefits of service orchestration also provide the framework for continuously improving your IT service management. For example:

  • The records of the executions can provide clues to improvement opportunities.
  • The scalability enables you to take what works and implement it as a best practice across your organization.

Furthermore, you can track and analyzing execution data over time in Analytics. The data collected in the Analytics Engine and the reports and visualizations that it can provide, will give you both insights on the effectiveness of your ITSM strategies as well as insights on pain points, bottlenecks, underutilized services, and other improvement opportunities. For more information, see Analytics and Reporting.

The People Involved

Everyone benefits when their IT services are delivered quickly and reliably. If not because their service requests are efficiently handled by an automated service orchestration workflow in the background, then because the IT support staff is freer to tend to the unique problem.

The people who implement service orchestration in an organization are IT teams from each of the systems that a process touches.

The people who are most motivated to implement service orchestration are the people who have to provide the services. They know that automation of many of their routine, time-consuming, or error-prone tasks will only help them better achieve their service level targets. These people fall into two categories:

  • IT support or help desk, the teams that handle incident calls.
  • IT services staff, the team that must provide regular services, including infrastructures, applications and other IT components to users.

For more information about the roles of people in different areas of your organization when implementing automated service fulfillment, see Planning Considerations for Service Orchestration.

IT Service Management

If you are on the IT service management (ITSM) team, you focus on delivering IT services to your internal and external users. Your team plans, designs, provides and maintains IT services for your users. To deliver these services, your team must navigate the various tools and systems in your IT landscape. To do that efficiently and reliably, you need to automate as many services as possible. Service orchestration is crucial to your strategic success.

The services fall into roughly the following categories, and service orchestration can help in all of them:

  • Standard operating procedures (SOPs)
  • Incident remediation
  • Providing users a catalog of self-service service offerings

ITSM must provide for both incident management and service request management. Although incident management may seem unpredictable, there are many types of routine calls. By automating them, you free up the team to focus on the more puzzling issues.

In ITSM, you focus on providing services to customers and you look for opportunities for continuous improvement. You can find them when you apply service orchestration with Automic Automation because you gain the control over your processes, transparency of your executions, and the scalability to promote best practices. You also have the data insights that Analytics can provide to help you define your strategies and plans.

The Role of Integrations

All enterprises use a multitude of IT technologies, platforms and applications. Therefore, a service orchestration Workflow must be able to access and pass data among the various systems and components. The extensive integration options that Automic Automation offers are a key factor to its ability to support service orchestration scenarios in any IT landscape. For more information, see Integration Options for Service Orchestration.