Introducing Automation Plans and how they work

You can create Automation Plans to automate your workflows. Automation Plans run multiple Fixlets, Tasks, or Baselines on a set of endpoints that you specify. Each Fixlet, Task, or Baseline can run on a different set of endpoints and steps can run in parallel or in a sequence. When you create your Automation Plans, you can set and save a set of default endpoints, default parameters, and filters for each step in the Automation Plan. This increases the ease-of-use and facilitates faster reuse of plans. You must run your plans from the Automation Plans dashboard in the Server Automation domain.

An Automation Plan is a collection of Tasks, Fixlets, and Baselines, each of which is a step in the plan. The steps in the plan are executed on a set of endpoints that you target. Each step in an Automation Plan represents a single Fixlet, Task, or Baseline and you can target each step at different endpoints. Automation Plans can be sequential or parallel. When creating your automation plans, you choose between a sequential or parallel plan.

Sequential plans: With sequential plans, the plan is executed in a sequence, one step at a time. The plan starts with step 1 and continues to step 2 after step 1 has completed. Then step 3 starts after steps 2 has completed, and so on. Sequential plans are executed in the order in which they are displayed in the Steps tab. If you move steps up or down in a sequential plan, the UIDs for each step in the plan remain the same. The UIDs do not represent the execution order of the plan. The execution order of a sequential plan is represented by the order in the Steps tab or on the Flow tab.

Parallel plans: With parallel plans, multiple steps can be executed at the same time. For example, your plan might begin by deploying an operating system to two bare metal computers. The next two steps might then run in parallel, one installing an application on one of the computers, and the other step running a baseline on the second computer. The plan might then merge again into a single sequential path or continue along a parallel path. The steps in a parallel plan are not executed in the order in which they are displayed in the Steps tab. To view the execution order of a parallel plan, use the Flow tab. You control the execution order of parallel plans by setting dependencies between the steps.

By clicking Take Action, you can deploy or schedule the sequence of steps across a set of endpoints that you specify, in the order in which they are displayed on the Flow tab in the plan. When a step completes successfully, the step action state is set to stopped and the next step in the Automation Plan is run. When the final step in the Automation Plan completes, the Automation Plan action state is set to stopped.

You can schedule an Automation Plan to run at a specified date or time. When you schedule an Automation Plan to run at a future date or time, the Automation Plan action is created, and remains in an open state until the Automation Plan Engine starts to run the action at the time and date that you specified.

For each step in your Automation Plan, you can target computer groups as well as individual computers. You can do this by saving default targets when creating your Automation Plan, or at runtime, when you are running your Automation Plan.

All Automation Plans that are created in the Server Automation domain are displayed as Fixlets in the Fixlets and Tasks list in the All Content domain. If you run or schedule an Automation Plan in the Fixlets and Tasks panel, it will fail. If you add an Automation Plan as a Component in a Baseline, it will fail. You must run or schedule an Automation Plan in only the Automation Plans dashboard in the Server Automation domain.

When you add a step to an Automation Plan, you are adding a Fixlet, Task, or Baseline to the Automation Plan. A copy of the Fixlet, Task, or Baseline is stored in the Automation Plan. If this source content changes after it is added to the Automation Plan, the changes are not reflected in the copy in the Automation Plan. If the source Fixlet, Task, or Baseline changes, the Automation Plan displays an icon indicating that the copy in your Automation Plan no longer matches the source. You can then update the copy in the Automation Plan with the latest version of the source if you have access to the source. For legacy Automation Plans, this notification is displayed only if you edit and save the plan.

Each step in an Automation Plan has one action. A Fixlet or Task that you add to the step can have multiple actions. When you use the Automation Plan Editor to add a Fixlet or Task with multiple actions to a step, you must choose one action from the list of available actions. If you add a Fixlet or Task with a default action, the Automation Plan Editor automatically adds this action to the step. If you add a Fixlet or Task with an action that has a script type of URL, you cannot add this action to the step.

When you create an Automation Plan, you must select a site and a domain to host the Automation Plan. You must also specify the Automation Plan source release date. You can specify the Automation Plan category, source, and source severity. When you create an Automation Plan, you can assign any value to the category, source, and source severity. The category defines the type of Automation Plan, such as Support, Uninstall, BES Performance. The source specifies the creator of the plan. The source severity is a measure of the severity of the Automation Plan. Typical values are Critical, Important, Moderate, or Low.