Automic Workload Automation

With a sizable Automic Automation Engine sysetm in place we are looking for the best way to document the processes we have in the AAE in case we would ever have a disaster.  We are copying our database to a disaster recovery location.  But you have that time before you decide to go to the DR system when the business whats to know what the current impact is.  Yes we have some workflows recorded in CSV files, but they are only good until an non-updated change takes place.  Thankfully this does not happen often..... 

Hey Scott,

There are a few things we do on our end at my company.  Our Database is backed up, and is the most critical thing.

I don't know of any process to automagically generate documentation, if that is what you are asking?  We did some theory concept on using JAVADOC type format in the DOCU tab, etc, but it just ended up being too complicated.

Here is how we document flows:

Every automation flow (Job plan) has its own word document.  

These documents are from a template that includes:

1.  Standard naming convention: COMPANY - AUTOMIC - SYSTEM - WORKFLOW SHORT DESCRIPTION NAME      Example: Foo- Automic- MyBillingApp- Invoice process.docx
2.  Header including (Last update date, reason, person)
3.  Table of contents (linked via internal doc links)
4.  Overview- Short summary 1-2 paragraphs max of the flow
5.  Access requirements - (Includes details about servers/logins/etc, NO PASSWORDS)
6.  Definitions and Acronyms
7.  Manual Start/Stop procedures(Only filled out for jobs that need to be stopped during outages)
8. Scheduling - Details about when this runs, name of object that kicks it off, any holidayinformation.
9. Process - Screenshot of high level jobplan (workflow), including step numbers on each item in the flow.  Small table fileld out for each step (name, purpose, restartable?, potential errors, etc)
10. Detailed overview of automation(anything that needs to be spelled out)
11. Disaster recovery- (Exact Manual Steps needed if Automic broke, and we needed to get all availble resources manually transfering files and running scripts)

Hi Scott,

Please see the technical white paper for configuring a DR environment:
https://community.automic.com/discussion/253/technical-whitepaper-disaster-recovery-best-practices-for-uc4-operations-manager-and-uc4-automatio

Hope that helps :-)