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 from the Automation Plans dashboard in the Server Automation domain, it is processed in the following stages:

  1. The Automation Plan Engine begins processing the Automation Plan action.
  2. The Automation Plan Engine opens a step action.
  3. The Automation Plan Engine 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 IBM® 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.

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.