SMA is a great tool for automation of many kind like IT related tasks or as an interface between two systems or business processes you would like to have done automatically. Building workflows is not that easy, but once you get the trick it is not that hard. After you built your workflows, at some […]
SMA
SMA – Error “Root element is missing”
While I was building SMA runbooks in the past couple of months I bumped into this rather strange error. So happen few days ago, I tried to call (invoke) a child runbook, from a parent runbook function. SMA returned an error “Root element is missing” I simplified the structure so it looks like this… Function […]
SCOM 2012 – Monitor SMA Runbook Instance (VSAE Sample MP)
When you are starting to automate processes in your company you soon will find out, that not all runbooks will run for a short time. There are also cases where you need a runbook, which is using a loop to monitor certain things or trigger other runbooks. In other words, there are cases where you […]
SCSM – Passing Attachments via Web Service e.g. SMA Web Service
If you do automation in a “Microsoft World” you probably start these days with Service Manager and Service Management Automation (SMA). At one point you will have a need for building a connector to another system for exchanging data. One example could be that you need to submit incident data from Service Manager to another […]
SMA – Runbooks Not Showing Up (e.g. Cireson SMA Connector)
My colleague and I have been developing runbooks for the past couple of month for automating business services. During this time we have written close to two hundred runbooks. Key application in triggering the runbooks is System Center Service Manager (SCSM) in conjunction with Cireson’s SMA Connector. This works great up to the past month […]
SMA – SMA Runbook Toolkit (SMART) Watch The Encoding
Recently while building some serious SMA runbooks I bumped in an issue. We usually develop the SMA runbooks in different editors like PowerShell ISE / SMA GUI / Notepad++ and keep them saved in TFS online, which we managed through Visual Studio. After we finished developing the runbook, which would update the runbook activity in […]
SCSM – Get Service Request Object From Any Nested Child Runbook Activity
When you are starting to automate stuff in your cloud environment you probably use SMA for automation and Service Manager to trigger the necessary runbooks in SMA. As this is really great stuff you will start facing many new challenges because you have to script in PowerShell to achieve your goals. Depending on your architecture […]
SCSM – SMLets “The criteria could not be parsed. See inner exception for details.”
If you are using the SMLets from codeplex in combination with PowerShell remoting to retrieve information from Service Manager it could well be that you hit this error: The criteria could not be parsed. See inner exception for details. + CategoryInfo : OperationStopped: (:) [], InvalidCriteriaException + FullyQualifiedErrorId : The criteria could not […]
SCSM – Apply SMA Runbook Template Using SMA / PowerShell
In my previous post I have written about adding activities to a service request using PowerShell SMLets. Well this just added the “empty” activities / “framework” but the activities were not configured yet. As an example I want to add a SMA runbook activity (using this method) and then apply a pre-configured SMA runbook template […]
SCSM – Adding Activities Using SMA / PowerShell Workflow
For the past couple of weeks I have been doing some automation stuff using Service Management Automation (SMA) and therefore PowerShell in conjunction with Service Manager. I like PowerShell very much, especially if I can interact with other systems. As you might know in the “old” days you would use Orchestrator and Service Manager to […]