SmartOps Core Platform 7.5

Overview

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 micro actions 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.

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 - Micro action, Workflow, and Automation Story. An Automation Story contains a sequence of workflows mapped together to fulfil 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 micro action
• 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 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. Requested execution will not be allowed otherwise.

• Design Studio - Implemented keyboard shortcut - Shift +, Shift - for zoom in, zoom out operations.
• Workflow (skill) Migration – Improved UX for impact summary view while migrating workflows
• Micro action listing view - Updated tag display in micro action 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.

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.

With 7.5 release, we are introducing Automation Library with micro action library containing 100+ micro actions classified under these main categories:

• Platform Integration
• Communication
• Storage
• Third Party Applications
• Transformation
• Utility
• Cloud

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

Following enhancements would be available as part of micro action discovery process:

• Enhanced micro action discovery palette in Design Studio
• Introduction of Tags, Language, and Minimum supported Platform version for micro actions
• Provision to bookmark favourite Micro actions in Design Studio
• Detail view for micro actions in Design Studio. This view will show details of the micro action and show all nested micro actions, if any.

• 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.

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.
• Rule Engine - Organizing rules  
  Implemented tree folder structure (Parent/Child) in Rule Engine UI to organize rules into folders.
• Rule Engine - Interface for rule creation  
  User can create and edit a rule file from UI and download as well.

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

• File-based integration
• API end point trigger
• Queue Flow trigger
• XML to JSON transformation adapter
• OAuth Adapter

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.

• (4887) HROps 7.4 Pre-Prod: Cloud attachments are getting failed by iHUB
• (4279) The password field value is not read properly in Service.Connect action in workflow

Release Artifacts

Deployment Artifacts

For Support and more enquiries you can write a mail to us on feedback.smartops@ust-global.com