Working with Actions

The Action Builder allows users to create new Actions (sets of objects) for common operations to be used in workflows.

Watch this introductory video to get a quick overview of the Action Builder:

What are Actions?

Actions are sets of objects that provide a special functionality -for example to start a Tomcat server- and can be embedded within other workflows.

Actions cover different areas of critical data center operations and help you to automate simple and complex tasks.

Examples for simple tasks are the following:

• File system operations or permission checks on Windows, UNIX and Linux,
• Starting, resetting or stopping web-servers or
• Managed transferring of files or folders across platforms.

Examples for more complex tasks are the following:

• Virtualization
• Package management
• Creating websites, web applications and application pools for various platforms like IIS, JBoss, Tomcat or Websphere
• Setting up and configuring database servers

You can access and re-use Actions from the Process Assembly perspective (see AWI User Guide).

For more specific information, see the documentation of the Action Pack where the Action belongs to.

Because Actions are parametrized with prompts for input values, they can be applied in a variety of workflows.

Structure of Actions

An Action consists of all of the following categories:

• A workflow
• At least one prompt-set for input parameters
• A set of sub-tasks for the actual execution

Furthermore, most Actions specify a rollback task that will be executed if the workflow containing the Action fails.

Technical Note: Actions are stored in the Automation Engine. Although they could be built in the Automation Engine directly, you would need to create many objects manually. The Action Builder provides means to create a skeleton for new Actions in a comfortable, integrated user interface.

What are Action Packs?

Action Packs are groups of Actions that are related to each other (for example, Windows File System Actions).

For example: the Tomcat Action Pack (which is available to download from the Automic Marketplace) helps you to automatically manage your application deployments to a Tomcat application server. The Tomcat Action Pack contains the following Actions: Create/Drop Datasource, Start/Stop/Resume Server, Create Snapshot, Start/Stop Application, Deploy/Undeploy Application, List Applications, List JNDI Resources.

For instructions on working with Actions and Action Packs, see the following topics: