Publishing in automated or manual mode

When the source of the service model data is the BMC Atrium CMDB, you can control when publishes occur by enabling or disabling automated publish.

By default, the Publishing Server automatically publishes service model objects to the cells. The Publishing Server service (or process) starts in automated mode.

To publish service model objects manually, you can disable automated publish and use the CLI command publish. For more information about publish, see publish.

Switching between automated publish and manual publish

By default, the Publishing Server service starts in automated mode. This is controlled in the pserver.conf configuration file by the parameter AutomatedStartMode (which is set to Automated ).

To permanently switch the mode (if you always want to control all publications, for example), edit the pserver.conf file and change the value of the parameter AutomatedStartMode to Manual.

To temporarily switch the mode in which Publishing Server is running, run the command pscontrol automated or pscontrol manual

Automated publish considerations

When automated publish is enabled, the following operations are observed:

  • Publishing operates in the background.
  • Publish is pre-authenticated if you password protect the Atrium CMDB Publish environment.
  • Publish requests are queued; a new request starts when the one in progress completes.
  • If multiple promotion and reconciliation processes are running at the same time, the throughput time of the publication increases.
  • All modified instances after the last successful publish are considered for publication, however there could be additional CIs being added to the asset dataset. So the instances that are promoted and reconciled, and the instances that are published are not necessarily the same.
  • Publication failures caused by reasons independent of model consistence (for example, when a cell is not available) result in the automated publisher reattempting the publication.
  • Promotion and reconciliation, and publish are independent processes. It is possible that the promotion and reconciliation processes are successful, but the subsequent publish fails.
  • If an in-progress publish is still retrieving publishable data from an asset dataset, it will also find publishable data that became publishable after the in-progress publish was initiated. This might cause the following:
    • Might cause inconsistent data (such as an impact relationship pointing to a nonexistent component) and publication failure. Such a failure cannot be prevented because the BMC Atrium CMDB does not have the concept of transactions.
    • Causes the first publication to also publish the data of the second reconciliation. The second publication displays the message Nothing to be published.
  • You can also use the CLI command publish.

How automated publish works

When a BMC Atrium CMDB Reconciliation Engine job terminates, the ARDBC plug-in notifies the Publishing Server that the reconciliation job has terminated. Publishing Server looks up changes to Infrastructure Management data in the asset dataset from the time of the last successful publication and attempts to publish the changes to the specified cells on publishing environments for which automated publication is enabled.

When the automated publisher is temporarily off, notifications from a reconciliation job run are saved in Publishing Server's persistent store. This ensures that no notifications are lost. When automated publisher restarts, all the notifications that are present are included in one publish request.

By default, automated publish is enabled on publishing environments with the regular asset dataset, so a promotion from the BMC Impact Model Designer to asset dataset is automatically published to the cell. By default, automated publish is disabled on publishing environments with overlay asset dataset and an overlay publish mode, so a reconciliation to an asset dataset of a BMC CMDB Explorer BMC Impact Model Designer test environment to a test cell is not automatically published.

Determining the current publish mode

To determine the current publish mode in which the Publishing Server is running, run the CLI command psstat. One of the following messages is returned:

  • Started - Starting Automated mode
  • Started - Automated mode
  • Started - Manual mode

In an environment without the BMC Atrium CMDB, psstat returns the status of publishing server as Started .

For more information about psstat, see psstat.

 

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