Patching Schedule

[Ann]

Morning All

Hope you are all well.

Please would it be possible to help/advise?  Is there a way that we can record a recurring patching schedule within service manager please?  Either as a change, Calendar or another solution please.

I have attached a screen shot of an example of a patching schedule.  We would like to record these details as the patching is undertaken monthly, quarterly etc.

We have tried to use the Activity in Service Manager Catalogue but it creates a scheduled job which is not what we are after.  Thank you.

Kind Regards

Ann

[Steve Giller]

Hi @Ann,

I'm not completely clear on what you want here - or on what you don't want, to be honest!

If you want a literal calendar display similar to your Excel screenshot then I'm pretty certain that can't be done in Hornbill.

If you want to automatically add the Monthly Patches to your Change Calendar I think that might be possible if the January Change Workflow finishes by raising a new Change for February, etc. A similar method could possibly create a recurring Request for each regular patch.

Really what we need here is a definitive description of what you want to achieve and then the best methods could be discussed.

[Ann]

Afternoon @Steve Giller

Hope you are well.  

What we require is the ability to log all the planned patching windows, as a recurring task (activity/change, whatever is appropriate) so that when we wish to carry out a separate Change/upgrade, etc we can check it does not conflict with a predetermined patching task.

Therefore we need to be able to log the regular patching tasks for each system, using the examples on the spreadsheet, for 6am to 8am on the first Tuesday of every quarter (13 weeks) and 6am to 8am on the fifth Tuesday of every quarter (13 weeks).

Kind Regards

Ann

[Steve Giller]

Hi @Ann

That sounds to me like having the internal patches as Changes so they appear on the Change Calendar would be the best option.

I haven't had time to test this, but it should be as straightforward as using the Log Request -> Log New Change node before the existing Change closes.

The trickier part is generating the dates for the calendar, which are not available as part of that node, so you'd need a ChangeRequests->UpdateRequest->Add to Change Calendar after calculating the dates you need - this could possibly be a Cloud Automation utility and could be at the end of the Workflow of the closing Change or the start of the new Change Workflow.
Unfortunately you'd need someone with more expertise on those nodes than me to get specifics if you need them, but I think that's the basics of how to proceed.

There is also the API Scheduler that can raise requests on a schedule, if that suits your purpose.