Platform v7.5 - Release Description

SmartOps 7.5 introduces multiple new features across SmartOps Orchestration and Integrations enabling users to build complex automation use cases, while using an enhanced RHub for integrations with external systems. New features such as automation library for microactions and user management systems in SmartOps will enable building feature rich packaged products leveraging SmartOps. As part of continuous improvement, there are enhancements in Packaged Workflow Framework (PWF), Rule Engine and Creator Studio.

Automation Story: High-level Reusable Automation Unit  

SmartOps 7.5 introduces Automation Story as the highest-level, reusable automation unit. With this new feature, the automation units in SmartOps will now be - Microaction, Workflow, and Automation Story. An Automation Story contains a sequence of Workflows mapped together to fulfill a specific use case.

• Automation stories will enable a user to define the end-to-end life cycle of a specific use case which was previously determined only during runtime

• Automation stories can be defined to restrict the execution of a workflow, depending on the results from the execution of a previous workflow

• Users can define end-state for a microaction

• Using all these features, a user can define end-to-end sequence of an Automation Story with all associated workflows, the various states that gets associated with each workflow, role-based access to trigger a workflow depending on state and further navigations.

Automation Story visualizer in Design Studio is planned for a future release. In this release, all the foundational capabilities required to build an automation story is made available.

UI Form Builder  

UI form builder is a new feature to capture a set of user-defined inputs and invoke a web form when a Workflow/Automation Story reaches a state awaiting manual trigger as part of Automation Story execution. Automation Story/Workflow designers can define inputs in the workflow (skill) property settings in Design Studio.

• A new UI Web Component which can be plugged in with SmartOps applications.

• When working with automation stories, the Form Builder acts as an interface which helps users to trigger a workflow in the automation story.

• Once Form Builder web form is invoked and, if the user who has triggered the workflow execution has the required role, the request will be pushed to SmartOps inbound queue for further processing, else requested execution is forbidden.

User Management System  

User data store is a platform component which stores user information as well as application specific information in a central location. SmartOps platform has many applications running on it and, many of these applications are required to store their own specific data.

This new system will store basic user information as received from the ID provider used for login, and offer applications running on the platform a way to store and retrieve custom information required for that application.

Automation Library - Discover Microactions  

Platform 7.5 release introduces Automation Library with microaction library containing 100+ microactions classified under these main categories:

1. Platform Integration

2. Communication

3. Storage

4. Third Party Applications

5. Transformation

6. Utility

7. Cloud

Users can discover microactions from Design Studio using a redesigned microaction palette which will showcase microactions available in local instance as well as in Automation Library. Microactions available in Automation Library can be downloaded to user’s local instance.

Following enhancements would be available as part of microaction discovery process:

• Enhanced microaction discovery palette in Design Studio

• Introduction of Tags, Language, and Minimum supported Platform version for microactions

• Provision to bookmark favourite Microactions in Design Studio

• Detail view for microactions in Design Studio. This view will show details of the microaction and show all nested microactions, if any.

PWF Enhancements    

• Grouping and ordering in Master Configuration listing screen for each SmartOps Organization  

  • Users can now define configuration groups and group fields within these groups

  • The order of groups and the fields within group can be changed

• Provision to add dependency configuration/fields  

  • User can define a dependency for a configuration field. When user create a new configuration, the user can add a dependency configuration with a value. For e.g., in AIOps projects, the configuration field ' ITSM Number of comments' should be displayed only if config field 'ITSM Read Comments Flag' value is 'Yes'.

• Support for mapping Flavors to Project and Configurations  

  • Users can tag flavors to configurations and projects, so that only the relevant data will be available in the project created in a flavor.

    • An Org/master configuration can have multiple flavors mapped to it and also, Org/Master configuration flavor mapping is mandatory.

    • A project can only be mapped to a single flavor. This has to be done during project creation and cannot be updated.

    • If a flavor is selected during project creation, then, only the configurations that are mapped to the flavor will be available in the project.

Rule Engine 1.0   

The Rule Engine applies business rules and actions as defined by end users without affecting how the application runs. The application is built to deal with the rules, which are designed separately. A rule engine evaluates and executes rules, which are expressed as if-then statements. The power of business rules lies in their ability, both to separate knowledge from its implementation logic and to be changed without changing source code.

Rule Engine - PWF Integration   

This would enable the PWF Project Config user to integrate rules with PWF while creating a project. Multiple rules can be integrated with project based on the configuration set for project creation.

Organizing rules into folders  

Implemented tree folder structure (Parent/Child) in Rule Engine UI to organize rules into folders. 

Creating and Editing Rules 

User can create and edit a rule file from UI and download as well. 

Creator Studio - UI Enhancements 

• Design Studio - Implemented keyboard shortcut - Shift +/Shift - for zoom in/zoom out.

• Workflow (skill) Migration – Improved UX for impact summary view while migrating workflows

• Microaction listing view - Updated tag display in microaction listing card with single line as default view and multi-line when extended.

• Creator Studio – Displays meaningful notifications when no roles are assigned to user.

RHub  

• High Availability enablement for RHub

  • Implemented Zookeeper – A centralized service for maintaining configuration. Configuration synchronization would be via Zookeeper.

  • Adapter configuration management via Central Hub

• New adapters that can readily be used for integration

  • File-based integration

  • API end point trigger

  • Queue Flow trigger

  • XML to Json transformation adapter

  • OAuth Adapter

• Correlation ID for Adapters - A new parameter – CorrelationID, is introduced into the adapter sync/async calls. This enables end-to-end tracking of transactions across SmartOps applications.

• POC for integrating Robocorp RPA with RHub successfully completed. The use case implemented was to detect subject, content, date, time from an email and create a ticket in Jira and assign to a user.