What kind of automation (SCSM, SCOM, SMA/SCO) does your organization leverage?
Adam_Dzyacky
Product Owner Contributor Monkey ✭✭✭✭✭
- Do low disk space alerts fire SCO/SMA runbooks that delete user profiles older than 30 days off of a device?
- Do failed Service Requests create Incidents with a Method of Procedure (MOP) and assign themselves to a group/individual to quickly resolve?
- Do Incidents occasionally (but automatically) direct analysts/end users to a knowledge article?
With the recent discussion of "what kind of service offerings does your company have?" It struck me that the area surrounding general automation really hasn't been touched on. So what kind of stuff is your company (but probably you
) doing?1
Comments
It utilised a series of Runbooks which checked if deployment was possible based on the software type and if a license was available, then it would tell ConfigManager to deploy the software to the workstation.
Only took about 15 minutes from approval to having the software installed and ready to use
Admin rights on local machines (SCORCH and SM) (with a lot of controls around approvals).
We automated automated checking that required fields on CR's are properly filed in.(using a RBA in the CR activities)
Some request automatically assign reviewer of activities to the manager of the affected user. this is done using a runbook that is triggered by an RBA.
We automated building a change calendar in a shared mailbox. (one runbook to create and one to update)
Then that calendar is published in exchange and linked on the portal.
We have a custom task for "Add to calendar" that allows users to add CR's to their calendar, (it triggers a runbook that generates a calendar invite with the CR info and emails it to the user)
We automated exporting attachments from the work items so that are not lost when archived off to the DW.
some request trigger runbooks that send notifications or upload data to SharePoint (like signed copies of policies)
We created a general use application access request that pulls data from the software asset selected to determine how to process the request and assign it to the correct team automatically based on that selected asset. (for some software assets we even automatically add the user to needed groups after approval) then logs it all to a DB for tracking of roles to update the onboarding process. This allowed us to do a single request offering and have dynamic routing to limit the number of steps it takes to get the request to the correct team.
The list could go on..
Review Activity Web Service
Using notification templates, an Azure web app that accepts parameters via URL, combined with Azure Automation webhooks in hybrid mode, managers can approve/reject RA's from an email. Would like to extend this to accept further parameters soon. Reason behind this is that review activities are hidden from people for now! Just a short term thing!
Jira Incident Sync
One of our internal development teams wishes to work in Jira. Have written a push script to raise a custom ticket type in Jira which maps across incident title, description, priority as well as comments. Comments are synchronized using an SMA job on a schedule. The Jira ticket label fields contains the SCSM work item ID which is used as a cross-reference for updating the work item. If the dev team resolve the ticket in Jira, it's closed in SCSM.
Active Directory Group Additions
Can allow users to request access to additional permission groups. The AD group name is added to the SMA Runbook activity in a text field.
Have a few more additional runbooks to get the parent IR, SR, PA for an SMA runbook. Other stuff that than! Happy to share and get feedback!
We use SC Orchestrator 2012.
- we have several run book which create a review activity assigned to the affected user or to the related user
- We have on run book which check modification of CR to update a GO Live outlook calendar
- We have some run book for SR creation or SR status pulling which are triggered by web services from our identity management application
- We have the run book for Asset Management to update display name with several field like information of location, name, supplier, keys...
- I also have a run book triggered by new file in folder application and which create a CI . This CI is available in a service offer (nearly in real time).
- We have run book which update a work item status from the stage of the activity in order to be able to quickly see in the work item a real step. We use it for CR in order to now if the work item is in development, review, test without the need to go in the activity tab
- we have a run book to update the survey CI name with the name of the related work item
- we finally have a run book which update the available licence CI field linked to people in the corresponding AD group.
Happy to share and to find in the this discussion new automation ideas.
- Processing SR requests from SCSM end to end; e.g. SSL cert generation to training class registrations
- A lot of dynamic ticket assignments, routing, and work item creation for SCSM tickets based on a myriad of conditions. This is a Pandora box and once management figured this out....
- SCSM ticket monitoring (making sure nothing slips between the cracks)
- Conditional alerts on IR opened in SCSM; e.g. SMS and Slack channel messages
- Generate custom SCSM reporting
- O365 license provisioning
- Vendor ticket synchronization with ServiceNow, Jira, and Remedy
- Enterprise master scheduler for tasks
- Auto-coordinates calendar meetings with SCSM PR tickets for RCA
I see no end in the amount of automation work we have. The only interest I have in other automation technologies is MS Flow and once Kelverion's Azure Automation tool matures more.
While a lot of it could probably be achieved with PowerShell and Send Keys, the IP is too attractive/simple to use that makes the work of building those individual processes not worth it IMHO.
- SCSM - runbook automation invokes a runbook to take the title of a sr and append to all manual activities for the tickets
- SCSM - for templates with review activities we append the parent ticket title to the review activity title, and same process for the description field
- SCSM - we just began using the ole ciresin article on extending wi to provide a method to include parent wi info for activities (http://cireson.com/blog/enhancing-activity-management-with-some-orchestrator-and-powershell-magic/)
- SCOM - alert invokes scorch automation to create a scsm ticket and escalate to our cloud communication tool (xmatters)
- I am working on approvals for temp access, as scsm and scorch are two easy ways to provide, remove, and track this stuff
I look on in envy on some of items others are doing, the idea for allowing others to enter a report request and the process is automated for retrieval and delivery is nice!
-Reset health state of SCOM alerts when an alert is closed in the SCOM console
-Automatic support group assignment of SCOM SCSM tickets based on SCOM management pack name
-Monitor SCSM ECL to send all SCSM notifications and run custom workflows
-Lots of AD, SCCM tasks to export data to SQL for some custom SSRS reporting (mostly around MS licensing)