When HP acquired Opsware last summer, one of our first questions was when they would get around to applying the IT Process Automation (a.k.a., Run Book Automation) technology to what had previously been the core of their monitoring and service desk offerings.

Roughly six months after the acquisition, HP let the other shoe drop, with the first half dozen or so process workflow templates. Specifically, HP is providing pre-built workflow templates around incident management, change management, and validating with the CMDB to update configuration items that are associated with a specific business service when the health of the given service is checked out.

The workflows tie together operations choreographed by HP Operations Orchestration (the former Opsware Process Automation System) that are performed by HP Client Automation (the former Radiaa product); Network Node Manager (NMMi); Service Manager (the former Peregrine service desk); Server Automation and Network Automation (from Opsware); Storage Essentials; and the Universal CMDB. Some of them include:

• Incident Management: When a fault is detected by Network Node Manager, instead of simply displaying an alarm, a process automation workflow would launch. Operations Orchestration would acknowledge the incident, trigger opening of a trouble ticket in Service Manager and updates Network Node Manager. In turn, Network Automation (the network provisioning piece from Opsware) would perform the remediation to rollback the destructive change and then closes the ticket in Service Manager.
• Provisioning a new business service. The workflow is similar to incident management with one prime exception. Instead of being triggered by a fault in a network device or server, the trigger is an order to introduce a new service. It would begin with opening a ticket in Service Desk, which would then dispatch a change order to Network and/or Server Automation, and so on.
• Service Health Check: Specific types of incidents may warrant further checks on the health of the specific IT service itself. In this case, a query to the Universal CMDB can be triggered to get an accurate list of configuration items related to the service.

Although the idea of IT process or run book automation is pretty simple (have standard automated workflows for common IT infrastructure management activities such as incident or change management), getting it all to work involves complex choreographies. That's because IT systems management has traditionally been a highly fragmented technology and marketplace; although folks like HP, CA, IBM, and BMC have long had common branding, that disguised the fact that the tools were traditionally highly standalone.

For instance, maybe you had a console attached to your network device operations console, but when it came to provisioning infrastructure to add a new instance of Oracle, you either performed the tasks manually, wrote low-level automation scripts, or used separate tools for provisioning disk and server resources and replicating or partitioning the database.

So it’s not surprising that, for HP to start gaining real synergies from a product portfolio cobbled together from the original OpenView business, Mercury’s Business Availability Center, Opsware, and iConclude (the process automation piece that Opsware itself acquired just prior to being swallowed by HP), that it would have to perform some fairly fancy footwork.

HP promises that these initial IT process orchestrations or workflows are just the first of what will be a growing library of templates that will come available with Operations Orchestration; the first few will be released in April, with another batch likely before the end of the calendar year.

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