System Center Operations Manager Activities

Applies To: System Center 2012 - Orchestrator, System Center 2012 R2 Orchestrator, System Center 2012 SP1 - Orchestrator

This integration pack adds the Operations Manager 2007 R2 category to the Activities pane in the Runbook Designer. The category contains the following activities:

Create Alert

Get Alert

Get Monitor

Monitor Alert

Monitor State

Start Maintenance Mode

Stop Maintenance Mode

Update Alert

Common Configuration Instructions for All Activities

The following configuration instructions apply to all activities in this integration. Links to this section are included in the configuration instructions for each activity.

Activity Properties

Each activity has a set of required and/or optional properties that define the configuration of that activity, including how the activity connects to other activities or how the activity performs its actions. You can view or modify activity properties when you drag the activity to the active runbook.

To configure the properties for an activity

  1. Double-click the activity. Alternatively, you can right-click the activity, and then click Properties.

  2. To save your configuration entries, click Finish.

In the activity properties dialog box, several tabs along the left side provide access to general and specific settings for the activity. Although the number of available tabs for activity properties differs from activity to activity, all activities have a General tab, a Details tab, and a Run Behavior tab. Some activities might have additional tabs.

General Tab

This tab contains the Name and Description properties for the activity. By default, the Name of the activity is the same as its activity type, and the Description is blank. You can modify these properties to create a more descriptive name or provide a detailed description of the actions of the activity.

Details Tab

This tab contains properties specific to the activity. All activities in this integration pack have the Connection property at the top of the Details tab. This property is used to specify the connection to the Operations Manager server.

To configure the Connection Name property

Run Behavior Tab

This tab contains the properties that determine how the activity handles multi-value published data, and what notifications are sent if the activity fails or runs for a longer than specified time.

Multivalue Published Data Behavior

The Get activities retrieve information from another activity or outside source, and can return one or more values in the published data. For example, when you use the Get Alert activity, the data output from that activity might be a list of high-priority alerts.

By default, the data from the Get activity is passed on as multiple individual outputs, which trigger the next activity as many times as there are items in the output. Alternatively, you can provide a single output for the activity by enabling the Flatten option. When you enable this option, you also choose a formatting option:

  • Separate with line breaks. Each item is on a new line. This format is useful for creating human-readable text files for the output.

  • Separate with _ . Each item is separated by one or more characters of your choice.

  • Use CSV format. All items are in CSV (comma-separated value) format to facilitate importing into spreadsheets or other applications.

The activity produces a new set of data every time it runs. The Flatten feature does not flatten data across multiple executions of the same activity.

Event Notifications

Some activities are expected to take a limited amount of time to finish. If they do not finish within that time, they might be stalled or another issue might prevent them from finishing. You can define the number of seconds to wait for completion of the action, after which a platform event will be sent that reports the issue. You can also choose whether to generate a platform event if the activity returns a failure.

To be notified when the activity takes longer than a specified time to run or fails to run

  1. In the Event Notifications box, enter the number of seconds of run time before generating a notification.

  2. Select the Report if activity fails to run check box to generate run failure notifications.

For more information about Orchestrator events, see the Troubleshooting section of the Runbook Guide.

Published Data

Published data is the foundation of a working runbook. Published data is the data produced as a result of the actions of an activity. This data is published to an internal data bus that is unique for each runbook. Subsequent activities in the runbook can subscribe to this published data and use it in their configuration. Link conditions also use this information to add decision-making capabilities to policies.

An activity can only subscribe to published data from the activities that are linked before it in the runbook. You can use published data to automatically populate the property values that activities require.

To use published data

  1. Right-click the property value box, click Subscribe, and then click Published Data.

  2. Click the Activity drop-down box and select the activity from which you want to obtain the data.

    To view additional data elements common to all policies, select Show Common Published Data.

  3. Click the published data element that you want to use, and then click OK.

For a list of the data elements published by each activity, see the "Published Data" tables in each activity topic. For information about Common Published Data elements, see Published Data.