Process Automation Tool

The Process Automation Tool allows customers and implementers to orchestrate and automate a set of infrastructure related multi-step processes. The tool provides the ability to monitor the progress of such process and each of the steps. The tool also supports user actions at the process and step level.

The process automation tool is made out of the following system entities:

  • Infrastructure Process - a Business Object of the Service Task MO.

  • Infrastructure Process Step - a Business Object of the Service Task MO.

  • Infrastructure Process Type - a Business Object of the Service Task Type MO.

  • Infrastructure Process Step Type - a Business Object of the Service Task Type MO.

An Infrastructure Process references a type that includes the steps that are a part of that process. The steps are executed one by one according to their sequence as long as the previous step ended successfully. When a step in a process fails, the process will stop and wait for a user to take further actions.

An Infrastructure Process can span up to two product environments. This means that it can invoke and monitor steps in two systems. This, for example, allows it to orchestrate a configuration migration (using the Configuration Migration Assistant, described in your cloud service’s Administrative User Guide) from one product environment to another. Such a migration can include steps to create the export data on the source environment, move the export file to the target environment and execute all the import tasks on the target environment, all as a single Infrastructure Process. In this case the Infrastructure Process will be created on the target environment and will pull the configuration from the source environment.

Note:

This is done in order to ensure that only application users with sufficient security privileges in any system environment can create Infrastructure Processes that can update that environment.

The rule is that when an Infrastructure Process is created to run processes on two systems, the process will always be created on the environment with the higher security requirements. For example, if you need to run processes on the Development and Test environments, the infrastructure process will be created and executed from the Test environment (assuming that the Test environment has higher security requirements than the Development environment).

The steps that make an Infrastructure Process reference a step type that governs their behavior. A comprehensive set of process and step types is provided with the product. This set can be extended by implementers as needed.