A friend asked me if it is possible to show the status of a related review activity in the “All Open Service Requests” view? After a while we realized that a requirements was to show the status of the last review activities, so if there were multiple review activities we just wanted to show the last one. The reason why they needed this view was that customer called service desk and asked about service requests. With a view like this the operator could easy see if all the manual review activities was completed, if the service request was still waiting on more approvals or if someone was building/working on the requested service.

We started by extending the Service Request class in Service Manager with two new properties, one to show the last review activity status and one to show when we last updated that status.

We use a runbook to update these properties

Comprehensive description of each activity in the runbook

1. Monitor Date/Time. The runbook runs every 30 minutes
2. Query Database. Truncates a database that is used to store data temporary. The runbook use a database table to store review activity information temporary.
   
3. Get Object. Gets all open Service Requests, from the extended Service Request class.
4. Get Relationship. Get related Review Activities for each open Service Request
5. Update Object. If there are no related review activities it will update the “LastStatus” property with “No Review Activities”
6. Get Object. If there are related review activities it will get the review activity and write review activitiy and Service Request information to the database
7. Junction is used to merge all threads together to one
8. Format the current time/date to a format that works with Service Manager
9. Query Database. Query the database to get last review activity for each Service Request and status of it
10. Update Object. Updates each Service Request that is in the database with review activity status

The result in the Service Manager console can look like this

You can download my example runbook and Service Manager class extension here, 20130616_SRStatus

Note that this is provided “AS-IS” with no warranties at all. This is not a production ready management pack or solution, just a idea and an example.

I received a questions a couple of days ago how to delay a runbook? The scenario was that someone submit a service request in Service Manager which includes a couple of runbook activities, but these runbook activities should not run until two days later. As we don’t want runbooks to be hanging, looping or paused for two days we can’t simple add a “wait two days activity” in a runbook. We also want to see in the service request in Service Manager that we are waiting for Orchestrator, and the service request should not be marked as completed until the runbook activities have run.

There are a number of ways to solve this. In this blog post I will show one where we use multiple runbooks and an external database to store data temporary. The scenario in this example is that you order a server reboot from the self-service portal in Service Manager. In the portal you pick a date and also set a checkbox if the server is an IIS server. Server reboot is only allowed after office hours, in this example around 23:00 every evening. The process is

1. You submit a service request from the self-service portal in Service Manager, saying that a server need to be rebooted at a specific day. You also set if this service is a IIS  or not
2. A runbook is triggered and write the service request data into a external database
3. The service request moves to next activity which is a manual activity
4. Another runbook is running every day at 2300 and checks the external database for reboot jobs that should be executed at that day. If there is a job the runbook reads all the service request details from the external database, restarts the machine and updates the manual activity. If the server is a IIS server some extra steps is executed during the restart

• Monitor Date/Time, trigger the runbook every day at 2300
• Query Database, ask the external database if there are any reboot jobs to execute (SELECT * FROM Reboot WHERE DATE <= GETUTCDATE())
• If there are any rows returned the runbook moves to Restart System. Restart System reboots the target machine, it also sends the service request id to the target machine shutdown tracker.
• Run .Net Script, waits five minutes (Start-Sleep -s 300)
• Get Computer/IP Status, tries to ping the machine. If percentage of packets received is 100 the runbook moves to Query Database (2) else it generates an alert in Operations Manager
• Query Database (2) query the external database if the target machine is a IIS or not. As we use that on the link as condition we need to do the query again. A link can only have a condition based on the previous activity.
• If the target machine is a IIS we check the web server service, if the service is not equals “Service Running” we generate an alert in Operations Manager
• Of the machine is not a IIS or if the web server service is running, we move to Get SR
• Get SR picks up the service request
• Get Relationship gets all related manual activities, in this example we only have one, named “Waiting for Orchestrator to reboot”
• Update Activity, set the “Waiting for Orchestrator to reboot” activity to completed
• The last Query Database activity deletes the reboot job from the external database

The image below show the event written to the System log on the target machine when it is about to be restarted.

Don´t forget to add a couple of activities to handle Operations Manager maintenance mode in your reboot runbooks too 🙂

As a alternative solution you could also create a new custom activity instead of using the default manual activity (example of how to build custom activity can be found here), then have only one runbook that checks every day at 2300 for activities of that class in “ongoing state”. The runbook can read all the settings from the custom activity, for example which server to reboot and when. If “when” is today the runbook reboots the server and marks the activity as completed.

Note that this is provided “AS-IS” with no warranties at all. This is not a production ready management pack or solution for your production environment, just a idea and an example.

A change calendar keeps everyone informed about when changes will be performed and also gives a overview of planned changes in the environment. We handle change requests as work items in Service Manager but there is no change calender out-of-the-box in Service Manager. In this blog post I will show how to build a change calender with a shared calender in Exchange, Service Manager and Orchestrator. The idea is what when a change request is created in Service Manager a appointment is created in a shared Exchange calender. Then all engineers can access that calender and see all planned changes in one view.

The first thing to create is the runbook. The runbook monitor Service Manager for new change request, when there is one, the runbook trigger and create the appointment in Exchange. The runbook is quite small as you can see in the image below.

I use the Exchange Users Integration Pack to create the appointment, download it here. The “Monitor New Change Request” activity is configure to trigger on all new objects of Change Request. The “Create Appointment” activity and the Exchange connector is configured according to the images below.

Below is a image of the result in the shared calender, that every engineer can see from Outlook

Done! It is a very quick and easy solution that will bring a lot of value for many organisations. But what if you want to add something manually? Then you can of course create a appointment manual in Outlook and invite the shared calender, but you could also build a service request and use the self service portal in Service Manager to add that. Include a runbook activity in the service request that create the appointment.

What if you need to delete or update a appointment? The Exchange User integration pack will publish a ID for the item you create, in this case a appointment. Write that ID back to the service request. Then you can create a runbook that monitor change requests for changes, for example status changed to cancelled, and trigger a runbook that delete or update the change request. If you then have the Exchange appointment ID stored on the change request in Service Manager it is easy to pick it up and update/delete the correct appointment, instead of trying to find the correct appointment based on title or start date. In the runbook below I have added a Update Object activity that writes the Exchange ID to the change request.

In Service Manager 2012 we can use runbooks from Orchestrator as activity in for example a service request template. This brings a lot of cool possibilities for automation in your data center. I have blogged a number of examples around this that you can find here on the blog. But in most of the examples I use only one runbook activity, and if I need to use multiple runbooks they are all started from one “master” runbook, not as individual activities in the service request template.  I came across a scenario where we needed to use multiple runbook activities in the same service request template and we needed to pass information between the runbook activities. One benefit with splitting multiple runbooks into multiple runbook activities is that it is easier to track the result in Service Manager, when each step in a complex workflow is its own runbook activity. This also gives the benefit that a Service Manager operator can re-start/re-run a step if needed.

In this blog I will show how you can use two runbook activities in a service request and pass information from runbook activity one to runbook activity two. We will also see how the result from both runbook activities can be published in the service request and self-service portal. In my demo example the first runbook generates an “account name” and the second runbook generates a “phone number”.

Each instance of a runbook activity have a number of “generic/blank” fields that we will use to store the result, they are for example named TEXT1 to TEXT10. Why not store the result in the Service Request? Even if the service request have some fields I could use I don’t want to do that as it would be difficult to remember what result I store in which property. An alternative would be to extend the service request class, but that would result that all kind of service requests would get those new properties, as they use the same service request class.

The first runbook, in this example named 12.1, has one input parameter which is the runbook activity ID. The runbook then generates an account (random 4 characters) and returns account name back to Service Manager.

In Service Manager I have configured that OUT from this runbook should be written to the TEXT1 field of the runbook activity instance. This is done in the service request template, on the runbook activity.

The second runbook, in this example named 12.2, have one input parameter which is the runbook activity ID. The runbook then generates a phone number (random numbers). Then it gets a bit more complicated 🙂

• Get Related Service Request. This activity use the input parameter, the runbook activity instance ID, to get the related Service Request.
• Get Service Request. This activity gets the Service Request that the previous activity found
• Get Related Runbook Activities. This activity finds all related runbook activities to the service request. We need to do this as we need to find the first runbook activity and read the TEXT1 field.
• Get Runbook Activities. The “Get Related Runbook Activities” will return all related runbook activities, in this example there are two runbook activities in the service request. The link after the “Get Runbook Activities” activity is configured with a filter to only continue with the runbook activity that that a specific title. This title is the title you configure in the service request template.
• Update Imp Result. This activity update the service request with both a implementation result and an new description. Implementation result and description are both visible in the Service Manager console. The description field is also visible in the self-service portal.

In the Integration Pack for Service Manager 2012 there is a activity to upload attachment, you can also look at attachments with the Get Object activity. But what you are looking is just the object, not the context of the file. For example you can see that incident IR123 has a related file (System.FileAttachment), you can see some properties of the file, like name and size, but you cant read it. This has been a challenge in a number of scenario. A couple of days ago I asked Patrik if we couldn’t do something about it and today he uploaded the first public version of a Powershell script. This Powershell script, Get-FileAttachments, will dump all file attachments to a folder. It works with both work items like incidents and configuration items like Windows computers.

One scenario that I read about in the forum a couple of days ago is the fact that attachments are not moved to the data warehouse in Service Manager. Instead you need to archive them before the work item or config item is moved to the data warehouse. There is no built in feature for this. But with a simple runbook in Orchestrator and the get-fileattachments script it is solved 🙂

This example monitor Service Manager for incidents that is updated with a new status that is equal to closed. The runbook then checks if there are any related file attachments, if there are, the script is triggered. The script that I run as a command in this example gets the SC Object GUID from the Monitor Closed Incidents activity as input. C:\SCSM_Archive is my archive folder where all attachments are stored. The scripts creates a folder named as the incident and stores all files in the folder.

Some time ago I wrote a blog post about converting incidents to service requests. That is a scenario where you also would like to include this get-fileattachments script, to make sure all attached files are moved to the other work item too. You can build activity and a integration pack on the script too, see this blog post for a example

You can download the script here.