IT Process Automation

We have a PAM 3.1 process that creates a Service Desk Incident from an HP OMW Alert. One of the values that gets passed to the process determines the Group in Service Desk to which the Incident should be assigned. The operator that gets the Group ID is the first one in the process. The process works great as is.

The problem I'm trying to solve is that if Service Desk is not available when the process is executed the process fails and no ticket is generated. If the Alert happens to be a Top Priority alert then the responsible team does not get notified that there is a problem. (This happened most recently this weekend when the Service Desk service got hung in 'Starting' status after the server was patched and restarted.)

I had the thought of looping the first operator, GetAssignedGroupID, if it fails by sending the failure port to a delay operator and from there back into GetAssignedGroupID, however when I do this after having shut down the Service Desk service for testing, the operator goes to Blocked status and just sits there; it does not loop.

I have looked at the DelayOptionProcess in the 3.0 tutorial and think I understand how it works but have not been able to transfer that understanding. I am still a relative newbie at working with PAM.

I've attached a screenshot of what I have at this point. (I've also tried putting both the GetAssignedGroupID and the Delay operators inside a loop operator but that did the same thing; the process got 'Blocked'.)

Any thoughts?

The blocked status actually means that the operator did something and then did not have a path to take based on what happened. So in your example, the Delay operator has no path from the failed port so if the delay operator was to fail for any reason, the whole process would go into a blocked state.

OK, I've added a path from the Fail on the Delay to go back to the GetAssignedGroupID operator but it still doesn't work. When I try to run the process with the Service Desk service shut down (which is more or less what I'm trying to handle) the Get AssignedGroupID operator fails and the process immediately goes to Blocked. It doesn't seem like it ever hits the Delay so it does not routed back to the GetAssignedGroupID operator. I will try to work on this some more on Friday and get a couple more screen shots.

If you have a better way of determining whether Service Desk is available I'm open to suggestions. I just need a simple (for now) way to have processes queue up until Service Desk is available to create the Incidents. Thanks for your information, Andy.

You might take a look at the content pack for Service Desk that you can download via the following link:

https://support.ca.com/phpdocs/0/common/impcd/r11/SVCMGMT_ITIL/SVCMGMT_ITIL_Frame.htm

These pre-built processes use ITPAM’s exception handling to capture the operator that had the problem and then reset that operator to try it again.

Andy Thompson
CA Technologies
Sr Support Engineer
Tel: 1-877-584-7267

Hello Ken,
The way it works is that once a operator is executed (does not matter success or failure), you cannot re-execute it by connecting a link to it. So in your case connecting the success of the Delay operator to the previous operator will not work. If you are using 3.1, there is no need to use the Delay operator. Every operator (barring a few) have the ability to not only loop but also specify the timedelay between the loops in seconds. Check the Execution Settings --> Loop which contains the options for Repeat Count and Delay. The operator will execute 'repeat count' times with that delay in seconds as provided.

You could connect the failure port of the operator to an email operator which would be executed and letting the relevant folks know that the operator was tried 'repeat count' times.

Hope this helps!

- Koustubh

Hi Ken:

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Thanks,
Mary