Difficult to come up with a good blog post title, as Service Management Automation (SMA) is part of Orchestrator 2012 R2, so in some way a SMA runbook is also a Orchestrator runbook J This blog post will show you how to start a SMA runbook from Orchestrator and then pass information from the SMA runbook to Orchestrator runbook data bus.

From Orchestrator we can start a SMA runbook with a Run .NET Script activity, shown in figure 1. In this example we start a SMA runbook named “justadelay”. “Justadelay” is a small SMA runbook that waits a minute and then sends back three variables, just an example to show how this integration can be done. Figure 3 show the SMA runbook “justadelay”.

In this example I run PowerShell remote session from Orchestrator runbook to a machine named WAP01. WAP01 is my SMA and Windows Azure Pack (WAP) server with the SMA Powershell module installed. You could of course run the script locally on your Orchestrator runbook server if you have SMA PowerShell module installed. The script includes a “while” loop that checks if the SMA job is completed, once it is completed we get all output from the SMA runbook job and insert it into an array named “output”. The “while” loop will make sure the Run .NET Script activity (in the Orchestrator runbook) waits until the SMA job is completed. The entire command (invoke-command) is within a variable named SMAoutput. SMAoutput is the variable we publish to the data bus in the Orchestrator runbook, figure 2.

The Send Platform event activity in the Orchestrator runbook (figure 1) is used to output the data returned by the SMA runbook, figure 4 shows one of three events.

Figure 1 Start SMA runbook from Orchestrator

 

Figure 2 Publish output to data bus

Figure 3 SMA runbook

Figure 4 Data from SMA runbook

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