Automation Plan processing

Your Automation Plan consists of a number of steps. When you run it from the Automation Plans dashboard in the Server Automation domain, your Automation Plan is processed by the Automation Plan Engine in the order you specified when creating the Automation Plan. If you run an Automation Plan from any other dashboard or panel, it will fail.

When you run an Automation Plan, the Automation Plan Engine processes it as follows:

  1. Begins processing the Automation Plan action.
  2. Opens a step action.
  3. Processes the step action on the endpoints that you specify.
  4. If the step action is successful, the Automation Plan Engine stops the step action and proceeds to the next step action.
  5. If the status for a step action is Failure and the step has no failure step, the Automation Plan action is stopped.
  6. If the Automation Plan contains a failure step for the failed step action, the Automation Plan Engine runs the failure step before the Automation Plan action is stopped.
  7. If the prior step action is successful, the Automation Plan Engine opens the next step action and begins processing it.

To calculate the overall state of an Automation Plan step action, the Automation Plan Engine gets the individual results that are retrieved from each of the endpoints. The Automation Plan Engine uses these results to calculate the overall state of the step action. This state mapping information shows how that overall state of the step action is used by the Automation Plan Engine to control the running of the Automation Plan action. The Automation Plan Engine runs each step action in the Automation Plan based on a wait, success, or failure status. For information about the states that map to the wait, success, or failure status, see Running an Automation Plan.

Important: Your Automation Plan actions are not visible to any other users, except users with master operator privileges, even if the Show Other Operator's Actions is set to Yes in the BigFix console.

Stopping an Automation Plan action

When you stop an Automation Plan action, the step action that is in process continues to run and its status does not change to stopped. This step action remains open.

You can stop the step action that is currently running by identifying it and stopping it. For information about how to stop Automation Plans and step actions, see Stopping an Automation Plan.

Note the following important points about how the Automation Plan Engine handles step and Baseline actions that are in-process when the plan stop time occurs:
  • After the point at which the plan stop time occurs, no more plan steps are issued by the Automation Plan Engine but the engine completes any actions that are still running.
  • Target endpoints that are targeted by a step that is open at the time of exceeding the plan stop time continue to process the step action.
  • The Automation Plan Engine stops issuing Baseline components when the stop time occurs. The Automation Plan Engine waits for currently in-process component to complete. The remaining components in the Baseline are set to not relevant and are not run. If there is a further step in the plan, it is reported as not run. A status in the dashboard shows that all components of the baseline might not have completed because the plan exceeded the stop time. In addition, the engine log file pe_console.log, includes an entry to indicate that all components in a Baseline might not have been processed if the plan exceeds the plan stop time.
  • Any parallel steps being executed at plan stop time will run to completion. Fixlets or Tasks in parallel steps are handled the same way that sequential plan Fixlets or Tasks are handled. Baselines are handled according to how they processed in sequential plan steps, described in the previous bullet.
  • The Automation Plan Engine does not restart any endpoints that are in a Pending Restart state after the stop time occurs.
  • For parallel plans, the Automation Plan Action Status dashboard shows the next step that was due to be run for each branch in the parallel plan (if there were further steps to run). For sequential plans, the dashboard shows the next step that was due to run (assuming there were further steps in the plan).
  • The Automation Plan Action Status dashboard displays a status of Plan stop time exceeded for any actions that was running when the plan stop time is exceeded. If the action is a Fixlet, the Fixlet runs to completion, which can be Fixed or Failed. If the action is for a Baseline, the Baseline component currently in flight runs to completion but any remaining components are not run. The Baseline percentage completion is set to Partial.
  • If you are using the email notification service, email notifications include the plan step status at the point at which the plan stop time occurs.

Using failure steps in an Automation Plan

When you create an Automation Plan, you can optionally add a single corresponding failure step for each Automation Plan step. A failure step can include a Fixlet, Task, or Baseline. However, you cannot add a Baseline that contains Fixlets or Tasks with parameters as a failure step. (Note that you cannot add a Baseline that contains Fixlets or Tasks with parameters as a regular step in a plan either.) If a step action fails and the Automation Plan contains a failure step for the failed step, the Automation Plan Engine identifies and runs the failure step action. You can target a failure step to run on either all of the endpoints for the corresponding step action or only on the endpoints that returned a failed status for the step action. When a failure step action processing is complete, the Automation Plan Engine stops the failure step action and then the Automation Plan action, regardless of the overall final status of the failure step action.