Service Manager: Runbook to Service Offering Part 2

In the last post, I talked about the planning phase of deploying a service offering and the need to understand your user. Now, I'm going to explain how to start the connection from Orchestrator to Service Manager

You'll notice that I am very consistent in how I name templates, runbook offerings, etc. -- this makes it much easier to align items later, especially when you may have a few hundred offerings in your Service Catalog and each has their own set of objects they rely upon!

Let's get started!

Synchronize the Runbook

This step requires that you already have the runbooks you want as part of your service offering created in Orchestrator. You will also need to ensure that you have the Orchestrator web service configured. In Service Manager you need to have the connector for Orchestrator configured.

1. In Service Manager >> Administration right click "Connectors" and select "Create connector" >> Orchestrator connector.

2. Provide the following details in the wizard:

3. Once the new connector is in place we simply synchronize the connector by highlighting it and selecting "Synchronize Now" in the tasks section of the pane. It will take a few minutes to synchronize

4. Once complete navigate to Library >> Runbooks to view the runbooks that are available.

Create a Management Pack

While this can be completed as a separate step, we will do this as part of the next step to save time. I have, however, captured the information we will use below.

Note: I separate each Service offering into separate management packs both for organization and also to reduce the number of dependencies each Service Offering has. This will make it much easier to upgrade, move, or change this offering should I need to at a later time.

All the request offerings, runbook templates etc. related to the Service Offering are stored in this pack:

Create a Runbook Automation Activity template

Now that we have our runbooks available in Service Manager, we can start to build the templates we will need. There are a couple of ways to do this, but I have found the easiest method is to find the runbook I want to add to my Service Offering in the runbooks list.

1. Highlight the required runbook and select “Create Runbook Automation Activity Template” in the tasks pane.

2. Provide the following information in the "Create Template" and subsequent "Runbook Automation Activity Template" windows:

3. Click on the Runbook tab and review the parameters mappings. You may have an activityID mapping (this will differ depending upon how the runbook has been created), if so you will need to map it correctly.

a. Click "Edit Mapping."

b. Ensure Runbook Automation Activity >> Object >> ID is selected

This ID value will be used by the Orchestrator runbook to find the particular runbook activity that is being executed.

4. Review the parameters that are required as you will need these when creating the request offering.

5. Click "Ok" and you now have the Runbook Automation Activity created.

Create a Request Template

Now we need to create the Request Template. This item contains all the categories of information that we need to collect and provide to users as they submit their requests in the Self Service portal.

1. Navigate to "Library" >> Templates, and select "New template."

2. Input the info below:

3. Now we need to create the activities for the solution. We will create two activities in this solution:  A review activity and a runbook activity

a. Click on the "Activities: tab.

b. Click the "+" sign in the activities window.

c. Select the "Default Review Activity."

a. Click the "+" sign in the activities window.

b. Select the Runbook Activity: Create a VM in the Contoso Private Cloud you created above.

c. Save your template

We have now created runbook and request offering templates that are connected to your selected runbook in Orchestrator!

In the next post we will create the request and service offerings.