Deploying Service Manager

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    (TRANSCRIPTION STARTS HERE)

    Anders: We have a couple of connectors within Service Manager and these are the connectors we have:We have a connector or integration for Active Directory to bring in CIs. We have a connector to Ops Manager to bring inalerts. We have a second connector to Ops Manager to bring in CI (configuration items) information. We have aconnector to Config Manager to bring in CIs from the inventory data from the clients and we can bring in data such as

    DCM (desired configuration management).

    David: Using the workflows, right?

    Anders: Absolutely. We have Orchestrator Connector, Virtual Machine Manager Connector and we have ExchangeConnector. Why is there an asterisk there?

    Brad: Actually that is an interesting fact. Here at MMS that was announced yesterday, Systems Center post Service Pack 1has update rollup 2 which has just been released. That has included with its support for the new RTM version of ExchangeConnector.

    Anders: That is not released yet, but it will be soon I can imagine.

    Brad: So that Exchange Connector is a big topic of interest to people using Service Manager for quite a while. It has nowbeen released to manufacturing.

    Anders: Everybody has been using it for years, but it has not been supported until now.

    Brad: Right so it is good news for Service Manager as a product release.

    David: Email I am guessing is probably a pretty important thing that you want to integrate into this Service Manager.

    Brad: In fact, it is the single biggest way that most customers get their notifications. Getting connection through email isimportant to Service Manager both to receive inputs as well as to accomplish notification so email as a channel isdefinitely very important.

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    Anders: Okay, so we have a basic general rule regarding connectors which is to start with, if you delete aconnector, if you delete one of these connectors, ever CI which came from this connector only will be deletedfrom the CMDB so what does that mean? If you have an Active Director Connector that brings in all the usersand you start registering incidents and service requests on these users and then all of the sudden someoneremoved the connector, all of these incidents will lose the connection through the user because the user CI willbe deleted from CMDB so be careful there.

    Brad: Unless we have an open service request in which case it will just kind of orphan the data, right?

    Anders: No, you will actually lose the CI from the CMDB so it will be a blank field so that is really bad. So, ifyou have a connector that you don’t want to use anymore you disable it instead of deleting it.

    Brad: So one minute you could be working on an incident request where you have an affected user setup inthere that used to come in from the Active Directory Connector. You will go and you will delete thatconnector and then you will go into that same incident request 5 minutes later and the affected user won’t bethere in the field anymore.

    David: That is a good tip then.

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    Anders: To start with we have the basic, the main connector really that is the Active Directory Connector. Weare using this connector to bring in information from the Active Directory such as Users, Groups, Printers andComputers. In order to register incidents on a user we need to have them in the CMDB, right? So, the ActiveDirectory Connector is a great start. You actually need it. Okay, you can add the users manually to the CMDB,but this is a huge benefit.

    Brad: Yeah, so try to think of this as kind of like you absolute base data that you want to use inside ServiceManager. So, inside Service Manager you have your work items which can be your service requests, yourincident requests, your activities, your change requests, so on an so fourth. But, the actual data that thosework items consume are your configuration items. At a base level if the data is not in the CMDB you cannotconsume it as part of the work items so you have to get that data into the CMDB somehow and the ActiveDirectory is a great way to do that. So, you connect to your Active Directory whether you want to do so fromthe domain level or the route of your forest or from different organization units and you can have several ofthese connectors. So let’s say you don’t have permission to bring in all the data from the Active Directory atthe root of the domain, but you do from 3 organizational units. Well, then you can very well create oneActive Directory Connector pointed at 1 organization unit and then create another Active Directory Connectorpointed at the 2nd organizational unit and the 3rd. Doing this is actually pretty important because you can getinformation overload in the CMDB, right? It can become a real Achilles heal.

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    Brad: Really making those decisions as to where you are getting the information, specifically around the Active Directory Connector can bequite important. If you are not certain, there is something to be said about being sure that you have enough data so the instinct may be to goto the root of the Active Directory and say, yeah, connect there. Give me everything.

    Anders: That is the thought people have, just take everything. It is too easy to do that, right?

    Brad: Yeah. However, let’s say in a typical enterprise organization you are not going to have permission at the root. That is often the case first

    of all. So, you will try the connector and, to begin with, it probably won’t work because unless you have the actual credentials for the serviceaccount required in the connection. But, if you connect to an organizational unit you will get just enough data. Let’s say you are actuallyproducing service requests or incident requests on a pool of 2,000 users, but you have your company that has, you know, 200,000 users so thepool of those users might be situated in OU so you would point that connector at that OU and you would get just enough information to beaffective when you are actually creating your incident request or service request.

    David: Do you see customers that are setting up kind of different Service Manager environments based on different kind of needs that are outthere like, do you know what I am saying? Let’s say you have one Service Manager environment and let’s say you have 200,000 users and youhave a whole different subset of an organization there. Maybe them setting that up and just targeting a specific, let’s say, section of thedirectory.

    Brad: I guess both those scenarios can happen, right? The optimal scenario there is that you have one setup for Service Manager because youcan actually configure role-based access control. So you configure your security groups in the application which map to your groups andActive Directory and that allows your different users to hit the console and only view specific information they want. Now, if you can get awaywith that, that is ideal because then the initial investment that you have made to size in architect for Service Manager product that should getrealized, but you get to reuse it in your different scenarios. It is according to role and who needs to consume that service, but we do encountercustomers that have political boundaries so one department says, okay, I want the Service Manager installation and I want to have access toeverything I want and this is how we want to configure it. You have another department that says, well we don’t really work with thatdepartment so we have a new project, let’s role in Service Manager, re-architect and go. So, technically you could still be pulling thatinformation form the same AD or some of those subset services, but there are needs on occasion to re-architect and just re-deploy.

    David: All right.

    Brad: Then there is the fact that you can deploy several management groups so you could just do project A, here is the line, project B or theway Service Manager can scale now you can actually setup 1 management group for the Service Manager Management Server and they cansetup another management group and you are still kind of hybrid realizing that investment, but then what you can do, is because of that dualwrite where you are getting information in the CMDB and some information in the data warehouse, you can still only connect to 1 datawarehouse management group and still somewhat minimize that investment. So that data warehouse management group would be sizedappropriately, but you are only leveraging one set of SQL servers to do that business intelligence analysis.

    David: It seems like there is a bit of waste if you were to setup multiple environments of hardware resources and with the management groupsand the role-based access control it sounds like you probably have a lot of good controls to kind of segregate things.

    Brad: But it does happen.

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    Brad: Filters on the Active Directory Connector.

    You can make it so when you are configuring the connector you’ve got a couple of different options. We already spokeabout the fact that you’ve got some flexibility around whether you pick that to go to a domain, an organizational unit. Youhave a little bit more flexibility. You can actually pick individual objects you are interested in. Let’s say you are onlyinterested in users. You are not interested in printers. You can pick that. You can also customize an LDAP Query so let’s sayyou are only interested in bringing in information from the Contoso East organizational unit and you are only interested inbringing in users from Department HR. You could construct an LDAP Query to get only that data into the CMDB.

    Anders: So specific users. So there are 2 types, there is static connector which is used when you are actually pointing to theactual objects. You are saying I want user Brad, I want user Anders and so on an so fourth and then you will only get thoseobjects, right? If you add a new user like Carl or someone, he won’t get in because he is static. Then we have the dynamicconnector which you spoke about and we were saying use LDAP or using that OU or something like that. So those are the 2types.

    Brad: Right and you also have the ability to either pull the data on an as-needed-basis so you can set that on a schedulewhere it will basically go on some sort of a time frequency and then resynchronize, pull that data, so if any changes aremade to AD or the underlying infrastructure that will get consumed into the CMDB or if you do it on an as-needed-basis youdon’t put that on the schedule and then you just basically go and you synchronize upon need.

    David: Is the default value, is that configurable via the GUI?

    Anders: When we talk about the schedule for the Active Directory Connector you are not actually able to set the schedulewithin the console unfortunately. If you wanted to set the schedule you will have to do that from XML, right?

    Brad: Yeah, from management pack.

    David: And the default value…..

    Anders: The default value is synchronized once a day.

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    Brad: Now we can go ahead and demonstrate that so I will flip over to our actual live lab environment overhere. We actually have a lab environment over here where we have got some connectors configured so I will

     just zoom in there and show you what we’ve got. These are really the defaults and I have only setup 1 ofeach. However, I mentioned that if you, say for example, the Active Directory if I had chosen to connect todifferent organizational units I could have selected more than 1 Active Directory connector and in this case I’veonly got one and it is going to be setup to the root of the Active Directory in pulling that data. I have also gotthe Operations Manager configuration items connectors setup. I’ve got the Service Manager connection toConfiguration Manager, we are not going to go into that. I don’t actually have a Config Man server live, but allthis just to say that we’ve got a lot of data in there. Just a fast call-out here, we’ve actually got some live datacoming in so if I go into my configuration item you can see that I’ve got some users and some computers inthere. We will just give that a second to load. If you look in users you can see that I’ve already got some datapulled in from Active Directory. If you go into work items and, say, we go into All Incidents, I’ve actually got anumber of incidents and this stuff is being generated live. As I get an alert in Operations Manager it isgreeting an incident in Service Manager so we’ve got some data there that we can show there too.

    To the Active Directory Connector itself, just to show some of that configuration, here is we actually go to theconnector and we look at the properties, here you name the connector and you decide whether or not to

    enable it or not.

    Anders: Usually I actually name the connector using the name of the domain you are connecting to or theorganizational units so you can tell from the view which connector you are about to edit so that is a good tipto know about so you put in the name of the connector, right?

    Brad: Right and also remembering that all this data that you’ve got in service managers in the CMDB and youcan pull that information out of SQL into a report or something so having an adequately and relevant namedconnector could be important in a later time. Just catch a quick snapshot of that data and what exactly it isbeing used for in a quick birds eye view. Notice, this is where you configure where you are pulling theinformation from is on this domain OU tab. You get 2, you get the domain OU and you get the select objectstab. On the domain OU I just picked that I am actually going to go to the root of the Active Directory so I justpicked, let me choose a domain OU, I browse to the root of my SYSTEMCTR.LAB domain and then pull the

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    information. I am going to define credential security so this is leveraging run as security which will typically besetup as a domain service account that has writes to read information from Active Directory and then populatethat same information into the CMDB and the data warehouse.

    Anders: When speaking about accounts, the best practice here is to use 1 account per connector. Let’s say 1account for AD and 1 account for Operations Manager. That is to minimize the security impact if someonegets access to your account and to increase performance and to make it easy to troubleshoot it because if you

    get and event in the event load you can see the source of this event and the user so you can tell which user itis.

    Brad: So in the case if you use the same service account for all your connectors and you are troubleshootingauditing information you are just going to see an access from service account. You don’t really get all the datawhere if you see Ops Man Connector service account than it is a lot faster to help you troubleshoot.

    David: What kinds of permissions would a user need to have access to pull it in?

    Anders: When speaking about Active Directory connector you only need read/writes. You are only readingfrom the Active Directory, you are not writing in it.

    David: So you could just setup separate read accounts for different OUs that you are puling.

    Anders: I mean, if you are reading from the same domain you can use 1 account for that, that is okay. But, ifyou are reading from several different domains you would need…..

    David: If it is a read only access it is not a huge security risk, right? So you are just pulling that down, okay.

    Anders: As long as you don’t use the same account for Ops Manager, Config Manager and so on.

    David: Then there’s more of a problem, right.

    Brad: Then there is a little bit of a security risk. Now to actual configure this connector itself from anapplication level the user much be a service manager administrator first of all to even view anything on thisadministration work space which is where the connectors are being configured. From an app level in servicemanager they need to be a service manager administrator to be able to do this. I mentioned that you can alsopick specific objects or specific classes of objects and this is where you are able to do that. You can pickcomputers, printers, users, groups. You can pick different types of objects there.

    Anders: Hold on a minute here. You have 2 important check boxes down here, let’s show these. The firstone, if you choose to select to import a certain AD group, if you check this first checkbox it will actually importthose users within that group.

    Brad: Right and it shows the group and it includes things like the group membership.

    Anders: No it doesn’t. It doesn’t do that. The actually members of the group it will bring in. The secondcheckbox here is, do not write null values for properties that are not set in Active Directory. What does thatmean? If you check that checkbox and let’s say you haven't specified a telephone number on your user in AD.You bring in that user and then you enter the telephone number within the CMDB Service Manager. If youdo not check that checkbox the connector will actually blank that field when the next sync occurs. If you don’twant it to do that you need to check that checkbox so it won’t over write with no values so that is an importantcheckbox, okay?

    Brad: So now that is the Active Directory Connector. Now we will flip back to our slides here.

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    David: One thing that related to that while you are switching here that you mentioned earlier is that youshould test the number of CI objects you have in AD before you do something.

    Brad: You should count.

    David: Count them, right, so just go and count how many objects there are in whatever that particular OU is?

    Anders: Yeah because that is used as an input to the sizing tool.

    Brad: It is just a quick validation check. Just so you make sure, like, if you’ve got 3,000 objects, but you areonly seeing 500 coming into the CMDB than you may have to check your connection configuration or likewiseif you are expecting 3,000 objects, but you see 35,000 you might want to make sure you are not going from…..

    David: Have a baseline of the comparison of once the import happens and beforehand look and say, hey, Ionly want it to be 1,000 objects, or roughly, and I am seeing 100,000 on that query so I should make sure theyare the same.

    Brad: That’s right and hopefully it is not the later scenario where you were expecting 3 and you’ve got 35because that becomes a little bit of a pickle to go in and clean that data out.

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    (TRANSCRIPTION STARTS HERE)

    Anders: Okay, so Config Manager has loads of informationregarding our clients so we can bring in that data into

    Service Manager using this connector so we can bring indata such as installed software on the client and primary

    user and so on. Which software updates do we have, forinstance. You can also use the connector to create

    instances upon computers breaching the desiredconfiguration management policy within Config Manager.So,

    there are actually 2 things you can create which we will doand you can create instances upon breaching the DCM

    policy, those are the 2 main reasons.

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    Brad: Then there is the section on how to create a connector. This is no different essentially than creating theActive Directory connector. You are going to go into your Service Manager console where I showed you’vegot that and first of all you add the Configuration Manager connector and then you will go and you willconfigure it. Once you are actually configuring it you will connect to the Configuration Manager database inConfiguration Manager so similar to Active Directory you are going to need read access to that database inConfiguration Manager so that is going to pull the data and then that service account also need writes topopulate the data into the Configuration Manager data warehouse portion and then that will write theinformation into the CMDB as well. So, the other thing to consider is the type. With Active Directory there isthe where and then there is the type of data that you want to synch.

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    Brad: So that’s basically in a nutshell the idea for the Configuration Manager Connector.

    Other types of connectors, of course, we started by doing the Active Directory Connector. We did theConfiguration Manager Connector. Now we are going to hit Operations Manager Connector of which thereare 2.

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    (TRANSCRIPTION STARTS HERE)

     Anders: We have 2 separate connectors, one for bringing CIs (configuration items), the inventory datafrom our servers and another connector to bring in alerts from Ops Manager so that is the two parts

    we have.

    Brad: So you can essentially populate both input sections of Service Manager. You can populateConfiguration items by pulling the data that Operations Manager already has inventoried. Things likeyour business services and things like your computers that you’ve got in your Operations Managersystem. You can import that in and sort of populate that information in the CMDB of Service Manager.Then for the alerts, right, that will pre-populate into your work items so primarily it is going to populateyour incident requests however you can configure that to also through a workflow setup servicerequests as well using triggered workflows. So I mentioned just different types of discovered objects.I did mention computers, but other things that might consider things like potentially you could importSQL databases. You could import websites. You could import all kinds of other things.

     Anders: Don’t forget about the distributed applications which is the next slide so let’s move on.

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    Anders: We have something called distributed applications within Ops Manager. You can monitor a serviceinstead of different specific components. You can bring in distributed application into Service Manager asbusiness services. We have the Technical Definition within Ops Manager, we bring it into Service Manager, wedefine the business information within Service Manager and then we have the actual business services. Youcan use these services within Service Manager to report incidences and service requests on a specific service.

    Brad: Right, so those are inside your work items, whether it be your incident request or your service request.In those forms you can have related items or business services you can link straight there. Just like your usersor your computers they serve as input items to populate data into your work items.

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    Brad: How to create a CI connector.

    Anders: There is nothing strange to it, right? You can go to the Admin workspace, you can go to create connector and youcreate your CI connector. The operations account will need read access from Ops Manager so there is nothing strange withthis one, but how do you select the objects to import, Brad? what objects do you import from Ops Manager?

    Brad: Right. So, there are a few key scenarios here. For Operation Manager in particular, that leverages the connectorframework. In Operations Manager there is a component that you have to go in and configure and actually leverage asubscription where between the connectors you actually pick different items.

    Anders: That is true for the alert connector. I was talking about when you create the actual connector to Ops Manager youwon’t get any data unless you import those Management Packs from Operations Manager which contains the object whichyou would want to import to Service Manager. You need to take those Management Packs from Ops Manager and importthem into Service Manager.

    Brad: So, remember initially we had the Active Directory connector which is capable of understanding things like your users,like your computers, like your printers, organizational units and so on and so fourth. Now, what Anders is referring to overhere is in order to pickup several objects like your SQL databases, your websites and things like that. At the start, ServiceManager doesn’t know they exist, right? It doesn’t even know those classes of objects exist. In order to provide functionality

    and definition to those types of objects you actually have to import the appropriate Management Packs that OperationsManager will be using, but provide that data into Service Manager so you say, hey, you now have access to these types ofobjects that I can use. Please input those into the CMDB using my connector and I can now use those objects and populatethings like my service requests and incident requests.

    David: So it is possible that you could have, let say data, that gets pulled in from Operations Manager that is not going tobe able to be used until you put the Operations Pack on Operations Manager so it is maybe not intuitive at first. It it like,why am I installing this Management Pack on Operations Manager when I am not necessarily using it, at least for OperationsManager, but then that gets pulled into Service Manager and it now lights up that information.

    Brad: Essentially Service Manager looks at it like this, it says okay you are asking me to import stuff, well I don’t know whatstuff is so let’s just drop it at the gate.

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    Brad: Then you’ve got the Alert Connector, right?

    Anders: When using the Alert Connector your service account needs admin rights within Operations Manager.You should be careful when you are using this connector because when you create the connector and youselect the import everything, you will get loads of incidents within your Service Manager installation.

    Brad: A little bit like what I am doing in the lab. You get a ton of incidents. For example, in our lab we have aswitch port that flaps so every time you get a switch flap you get an alert and that will create a newcorresponding incident requests. Let’s say that thing flaps 20 times a minutes, then I am going to get 20 alertsgenerated in Operations Manager and using the subscription data that is just going to get flooded across thewire and create 20 incidents. You have to tune your subscription data from Ops Manager to Service Managerand sign up to limit that.

    David: Say, if there is X number in so many seconds, deliver me 1 method, not 15 or 20 or whatever.

    Brad: or not take into consideration that data at all until proper tuning has been done on the Ops Managerside to actually control those alerts.

    Anders: This is a selective connector. You can just import these kinds of alerts, right? You can fine tune theAD Management Pack, you can just import those alerts into Service Manager.

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    Brad: All right, so we have a demo of the Ops Manager Connector over here. I will let you show that. I will

     just flip into my environment for you. We have the Configuration Item Connector here and we have the AlertConnector so I will give you that.

    Anders: There is nothing strange to it really. I will look at the CI connector first. You are just pointing to theactual server. Her we should be using a separate account for the connector, right? Then you are selecting,which Management Pack do you want to import? We import those Management Packs from OperationsManager into Service Manager and then you have to go into this box over here and select this. If you addManagement Pack 4 SQL database you have to select that Management Pack over here.

    Brad: or Virtual Machines or whatever, right?

    Anders: Here is the portion that you can specify when you want to synch this connector. You can specify this

    schedule from within Service Manager. I am looking at the Alert Connector which is over here. Again, I ampointing to the Operation Manager Server and here we are creating a rule for which alerts to import. You canactually say here, all incidents created by this rule use a certain template.

    Brad: For example, what you can do is, I was talking about in Service Manager when you create your incidentsor when you create your service requests these populate using forums, right? So I mentioned that as you getalerts in Operations Manager, as those incidents get created you might want to have the questions alreadyanswered for a new incident like what kind of priority it is, what kind of urgency to respect your service levelswhich you have defined as we’ve discussed earlier in the course.

    Anders: and you can route them to the correct person. So that is great. So depending on which kind of alertit is you can route it to the right group or person right away.

    Brad: You can also pick a different criteria type, right? You can say as it comes from a different ManagementPack, take this action. What computer did these alerts come from so you have a little bit of granularity that

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    you can setup here.

    David: Here this would obviously play a really important role to setup a lot of different ones based on a lot ofthe different criteria of alerts that you are wanting to get.

    Brad: That can happen for darn sure so just like we did for the Active Directory Connector if it is setup at

    different levels it is a similar approach.

    David: Is there a good general principal on how to separate that out? Obviously there is customization withinafter the data is already there versus what it is pulling in.

    Anders: You are going to have a base template alert and you are going to use that if you don’t have a certainrule for that. You have one base rule and then you specify.

    Brad: But as far as strategy for different types of connectors to do, you could use a similar approach than youmight use within Operations Manager that you would take with notifications so you might take all critical typesof alerts, it would get pulled in and then you would use a configuration connector for that, all warning typealerts. It might not get synched or all critical alerts, but that come from SQL……

    Anders: Right, take one portion at a time.

    Brad: You would use a similar approach, I guess, to how you would define your notification systemsubscriptions in Operations Manager because that is how that data gets pulled across through theconnector. So similar strategies.

    Anders: Let’s take a look at one work item created from the connector.

    Brad: Okay. Sure. So if we go work items and then we go to all incidents, it will just take a second to load up.Here you go.

    Anders: Here we have quite a lot of incidents and if you take one of these, this one should be an incidenttaken from the actual Ops Manager Connector. You can see all the details from the alert. You can see it righthere. We actually have more data over at the extension tab so you can see more data on these kinds of alertswithin Service Manager so you don’t have to use both the Operation Manager console and Service Managerunless you are going really deep on the alerts. You have plenty of information right over here on the consolefor Service Manager.

    Brad: As Anders was saying about the data that gets populated into the CMDB this data wouldn’t be possibleto get all of this information if the Management Packs weren't important, right?

    David: You bring up a good point in that Operations Manager in and of itself can fire off some actions as wellso when are there good scenarios to pull it into Service Manager versus just using kind of the built infunctionality that Operations Manager provides.

    Anders: Well I mean, people are actually working on these alerts. They are actually spending time to resolvethese. Then you should have a ticket within Service Manager to report that, to get your statistics to doreporting on. Right?

    David: Yeah because Operations Manager is maybe just going to send you alerts, fire you some emails, but ifyou want ticketing, management system or you want to fire off a series of maybe complex actions based uponan alert than that is where Service Manager comes in to play.

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    Brad: As Operations Manager projects that has long been a request of customers is to integrate with anexisting ticketing system and this just happens to be Microsoft’s implementation of a ticketing system. You areactually just getting that flow of data and that continuity and that same messaging information, thatknowledge richness being pulled in from what was present in the alert and is just showing up in an incident. Itcould be different people acting on this stuff too, right? You could have Sys Admins who are controlling theOperation Manager management group whereas now using the incidents request you might have help deskstaff that are looking at that who aren't necessarily seeing the alerts coming in through Operations Manager,

    but they are getting them reflected as incidents requests and they taken different actions based on yourdefined business processes.

    David: Makes sense.

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    David: There are obviously a lot of connectors here and there is no way we have time. We only have like afew minutes left here to cover them all, but it seems like it is pretty simple to just go through and add theconnectors. Some of the little tricks and tips that you guys have given here to get things going.

    Brad: Right. Just something fast, fast to cover. We will blow by the Orchestrator Connector. The Exchange

    Connector what is interesting there is that in the Exchange Connector you hook up with an Exchange system,but in that particular connector it actually shows you the format with which you can bring information in. Let’ssay for example that I get a notification in my in-box that says, okay, this is coming from Service Request223355111, right? I spouted out a number. It says, okay, you have to perform this activity, enable the user inActive Directory, that’s fine and now to interact with the service request I can do so directly from my in -box so Ican actually hit reply and as long in my reply as I have with square brackets that service request number thatthe information came from, that will actually populate information right into the service request usingExchange Connector.

    David: Very cool.

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    Anders: This is a very important connector for Service Manager actually because it makes it possible to automate servicerequests put in Service Manager so let’s say, if you want to automate the creation of users upon request in Service Manager,you need this integration so you are creating this connector to bringing the Runbooks from Orchestrator through the CMDBof Service Manager and then you can create different activities to use within your service request template to do thatautomation. It is a pretty easy connector to setup. You only point it towards the actual web service of Orchestrator andthen it will import those Runbooks. It is an easy connector to create, but it is really powerful.

    Brad: So similar to the way that the Operation Manager connector uses CI Connector and then information which uses awork item. Only the CIs in this case are Runbook activities so those get pulled into the library, but you can also havemessaging passed back and fourth so as inputs you can actually perform actions using the Service Manager connector withinService Manager so you could say, create this service request, create an incident request using a Runbook and then youcould actually leverage those details and have them defined as configuration items so to speak and have them pulled intoyour service request or incident requests as your related items themselves within those particular things.

    David: So the Runbooks when they get imported, it is more of a, I am aware of them and I am going to be able to call themout so that when you are creating workflows and things that you can fire off the Runbook to connect Orchestrator and dosomething.

    Anders: And pass input from Service Manager to the Runbook within Orchestrator.

    David: Very cool. So what else would you recommend. I know we cant cover them all, but are there some other resourcesor places you might point people to if you want to know more about connectors and how to do things with connectors?

    Anders: We have the Technet library. We have loads of blogs out there. The official Service Manager blog is really good.

    Brad: The engineering blog, right? There is also Systems Center Central which is a good source of information on thecommunity. You can get a lot of resources available on CodePlex which is Microsoft’s sort of open source initiative thereand in fact I used some in the presentation yesterday. There are a few community resources there too.

    David: All right, thank you guys so much for your time and helping out.

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    6/14/2013 11:13 A