Promoting the service model

After promoting CIs in BMC Impact Model Designer, these changes are stored in the production dataset ( BMC.ASSET) in the BMC Atrium CMDB and are automatically published (by default) to the assigned cells.

About the promotion and publishing process

Promotion and publishing are decoupled. Promotion is initiated and controlled from BMC Impact Model Designer, while publication is controlled by the publishing server.

There are two modes of running the publishing server, which are as follows:

• In automated mode, by default, publication is initiated by the completion of a reconciliation job run, such as after a promotion.
• In manual mode, publication is initiated from CLI commands.

Note that a successful promotion does not guarantee that the automated publication will also be successful.

During the publishing of a service model, new or modified service model components and their relationships are selected from the BMC.ASSET dataset in the BMC Atrium CMDB and copied to respective cells. The objects in BMC.ASSET are compared to any previously published instance in BMC.ASSET, and the changes between them are sent to the cell.

Before you promote and publish

To ensure a successful promotion and publication of the service model, verify whether the following criteria are met:

• The top level CI (selected by publication filters to be published with their provider CIs) is assigned to a cell.

• Each CI has a unique alias name/value.
• All target cells that are registered in Infrastructure Management are running and have a live connection with the publishing server.
• The publishing server is running in automated mode. For information, see Publishing in automated or manual mode.
• The Infrastructure Management class definitions are in sync. The publishing server validates the class definitions. For information about synchronizing class definitions, see Exporting class definitions from BMC Atrium CMDB to cells.

Submitting a promotion

When you submit a promotion, the Promotion Preview dialog box offers the opportunity to compare your unpromoted sandbox service model CIs and relationships with those that have already been promoted so that you can verify the work done in the current editing session. When you click Promotion, service model objects (CIs and impact relationships) shown in the preview are promoted (and subsequently automatically published).

To promote all sandbox configuration items and relationships

1. On the toolbar, click the Promote Sandbox Changes icon to start the promotion.
2. In the Promotion Preview dialog box, in the Instances to be Promoted area, you can filter the list of objects according to CIs or relationships or both.

   Filtering the list affects only it only affects what is visible, not what will be promoted. All items are promoted. You can click a CI to view its details in the right pane.

3. In the right pane, review the list of attributes for the selected CI. You can use the Show list to view only those attributes that have been edited or all attributes.
   
   Icons in Objects-to-be-Published pane
   
   

   Column heading	Icon	Description
   Action		Object was deleted
   		Object was added
   		Object was modified
   Type		Component
   		Relationship

4. Click Promotion.

After a successful promotion, the publication of the service model is triggered. Publication may take time depending on the size and load of the service model.

Verifying the promotion status

After you submit a promotion request, you can view its status in the Promotion in Progress dialog box that displays after a promotion is requested.

After the promotion process completes, a dialog box will display indicating whether the promotion succeeded or failed.

Viewing the publication status

To view the status of the publication (if the publication is a success or a failure) perform the following steps:

• Run the pshowlog command from the system in which the publishing server is installed.
• View the publish history from the administration console. For information about this, see Viewing publication history.

Publishing target cells

You can set the target cell for the publication of the CI using Impact Model Designer. The list of available 'cells' are the cell aliases as registered in the Publishing Server. For more information see About home cell and cell alias. For publishing service impact data after creating and promoting it with BMC Impact Model Designer, Publishing Server defines by default a 'Default' publication environment as per the parameters set in the Default environment, filters and cell section of the pserver.conf file. For more information, see About default publication environment, filters, and cell aliases.