Getting all automation connections from within SMA of a given type

I'm currently looking at how I can migrate some runbooks from System Center Orchestrator 2008 R2 to Service Management Automation (SMA). One issue I have in Orchestrator is that it isn't possible to subscribe to a configuration activity if you package it up into an Orchestrator Integration pack (OIP). To get around this, you can use the invoke.net activity and call the Class directly from the DLL.

Why does it matter your thinking?  One scenario we have is that we want to be able to have a common runbook, and execute it against multiple load balancers. Each of these connections is then stored in Orchestrator.. and the caller passes the configuration name in (which is actually the lb hostname) and then it connects with the correct credentials.

Anyway I was thinking about how I could do the same or achieve the same in SMA, and realised that it was a non issue, I then started migrating some other runbooks, and one task requires running against all instances of an env.. for example VMWare - Go get all VM's across all vcenters..

I thought I'll just get all the connections of a given type and easy done, however Get-AutomationConnection has a mandatory parameter of the name.. and wildcards don't work.

I had a quick nosy in the database and realised it should be easy to do what I needed, so what I have done is create a workflow that queries the relevant table in the DB for the connections and then returns the name so you can use that to return the credential / connection pair required. This maybe achievable in other ways but I am new to SMA :)

The scripts are available here: Get-AutomationConnections.ps1 and an example of calling it here: UseMultipleConnections.ps1

Executing SMA runbooks from linux

I've been trying to work out a way of executing SMA runbooks from some of our linux systems.

so I have knocked together a crude python script that can be further extended for doing such a task..

python isn't my language of choice - this is probably quite apparent in the lack of classes etc.

typically SMA uses ODATA for the interface via REST - this was proving too much of an issue, so I resorted to regex and extracting the data from the XML that I needed.. Initially I was going to use XPATH to do it, but things like elementtree didn't seem to like the 'XML'.

Below is a pic of the output:

Anyway I have uploaded the script to my codeplex site located here: http://smaworkflows.codeplex.com/SourceControl/latest#Python/SMARunbooks.py


Also a thanks should be mentioned to Laurie Rhodes for the information provided here:
http://www.laurierhodes.info/?q=node/105

SMA Workflows

I'm trying to get to grips with SMA and what it will take for us to migrate existing integration packs and runbooks that we have authored in C#

I'm going to try and keep everything we have done open, So I am uploading all the scripts to a new codeplex site I created located here: smaworkflows.codeplex.com

I've just created one for sending text messages via a provider called AQL for more details see here: www.aql.com/sms/

The above script is located here: http://smaworkflows.codeplex.com/SourceControl/latest#Misc/Send-SMS.ps1 if anyone is interested.