Getting started with BMC Service Desk Automation run book
This topic describes how the BMC Service Desk Automation run book works and the products involved.
What is the BMC Service Desk Automation run book
BMC Service Desk Automation run book enables fulfillment of service requests submitted by the end user in a service desk application. Service requests are made available to the end user via a service catalog. Examples of services requests include reporting issues with IT systems, requesting changes to employee data, and onboarding new employees. Service requests appear as incident, change or work order tickets in BMC Remedy ITSM. When ITSM tickets reach a pre-determined state, like scheduled or work in progress, the run book is triggered to perform the fulfillment task.
What products are involved
Before you install the BMC Service Desk Automation run book, you must ensure that the following products are installed and configured.
BMC Service Request Management
BMC Service Request Management (SRM) is a portal for users to request a service offering from a service catalog. Service offerings could be Unlock Account, Reset Password, Extend Mail Box Size, Provision a Computing Resource, Onboard an Employee, etc. A service request is an instance of a service offering. Service offerings are created and exposed to users by defining Service Request Definitions (SRD) in BMC Service Request Management by an SRM Administrator.
Before using the BMC Service Desk Automation run book, you must define business services, create SRDs. SRDs are dependent on backend SRM and Remedy ITSM artifacts called Process Definition Template, Application Object Template and Application Template.
A service offering is represented by a service request definition (SRD). A standard SRD typically includes a description of the service offered, price, required approvals, and user entitlement according to the service level management criteria. It can also include questions for the requester. The user's responses are passed on to the fulfillment application that is responsible for fulfilling the request. The SRD specifies the process to fulfill the request, such as forwarding work orders to the appropriate people to fulfill the service request. This process is represented as a Process Definition Template (PDT) in SRM. Each process is made up of one or more Remedy ITSM objects represented as Application Object Template (AOT) in SRM. Each AOT is related one Remedy ITSM object similar to an ITSM templates or an ITSM template, called Application Template itself. An application template is an incident, change or a work order template. In the case of BMC Service Desk Automation run book, by default, an Application Template is used to create incident, change or work order tickets.
The following video provides instructions on how to create a service request definition.
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-sUdcQiRjPQ
For more information, see BMC Service Request Management online technical documentation.
BMC Remedy ITSM
When a user requests for a service in SRM, details of the service request is passed to an incident, a change, or a work order ticket in the BMC Remedy ITSM application. In the case of the BMC Service Desk Automation run book, details of the service request is stored in the Work Log field of the ITSM ticket. Typical information present in the work log are, service type (hard coded to Service Desk Automation), action type (service name defined in the Service Catalog) and answers to questions or prompts posed to the user in the SRM request. When the ITSM ticket status reaches a specific state, a notification is generated. The notification triggers BMC Service Desk Automation run book to perform the fulfillment task. BMC Service Desk Automation run book related notification filters are created in BMC Remedy ITSM when you install the BMC Service Desk Automation run book.
The following figure shows a sample notification sent for an incident from BMC Remedy ITSM to BMC Atrium Orchestrator.
While you can customize the notification, ensure that you change the corresponding rules in the BMC Service Desk Automation module in BMC Atrium Orchestrator, which trigger the processes based on the information received from the notification. For example, the default templates available with the run book generate the Service Type as Service Desk Automation. A rule in BMC Atrium Orchestrator is triggered when the event which contains ServiceType=Service Desk Automation phrase is received.
BMC MyIT
BMC MyIT presents users an easy way to interact with the corporate IT department from their mobile devices or a browser. IT can manage and control service requests, service statuses, and the availability calendars of IT personnel. BMC Service Desk Automation run book can be used to automate fulfillment of the service requests made available to the users via a Unified Catalog. Users visit the Unified Catalog to request services, such as a password reset, a software or mobile app installation, or changes to employee status.
To create a catalog, BMC MyIT pulls in services and other resources available to employees from BMC Service Request Management - service request definitions.
You can install and configure BMC MyIt only if you want to automate fulfillment of BMC MyIT requests by using the BMC Service Desk Automation run book.
BMC Atrium Orchestrator
BMC Atrium Orchestrator acts as a fulfillment provider in this solution. In other words, when a user requests a service from the service catalog in BMC Service Request Management, an incident, a change or a work order is created in the respective applications. The ITSM ticket contains details of the service request in the work log field. When the ticket reaches a certain state, like Assigned (in the case of an incident and work order) or Scheduled (in the case of a change) BMC Atrium Orchestrator is notified. This notification occurs due to the pre-installed notification filters that are installed when you install the BMC Service Desk Automation run book. The notification triggers the run book processes and updates the ticket status to record that the automation process is in progress. The run book proceeds to perform the automation task. Upon completion of the task, the ticket is updated to completed status. The ITSM ticket is updated and subsequently the SRM request is marked as complete.
The BMC Service Desk Automation module enables you to automate service requests that appear as change requests, incidents or work orders requested by the end user from the BMC Service Request Management system.
Where to go from here
After you understand the key concepts of the BMC Service Desk Automation run book, you can start installing the required products in your environment to implement the run book. For more information, see Installation-roadmap-for-BMC-Service-Desk-Automation-run-book.