Howdy out there in automation land!!! I hope everyone is having a nice ramp down to the school year and is getting ready for summer. I know we are :) I hope plenty of you folks are heading to Cisco Live in San Diego in a few weeks too!!!! I plan to be there, so feel free to hit me up on email or look me up in the NOC. I would love to meet some of the readers and viewers and have automation chats. So what do I have for you this time? This time we are going to look at workflow creation... basic workflow creation.   Now what movie poster would this be you say? Well I like to think of new workflows as a "New Hope" for automation... so how about this?     This might be a bit of a replication of some of the *really* old CPO stuff, but Action Orchestrator is a *NEW* product. It is the NextGen, but is net new as well. So I want you guys to treat this as such. On top of that, know that (unless otherwise) most of my blog going forward will be centered around AO. So get excited!   I will give you guys some steps to follow here... but of course there is a video below as well :)   Now, for this, something you can do first is create the users and targets. In the recording I already had them and talked to creating them on the fly, but you might find it easier to create them first... for this "lab" we need a web target(http) and an email server.   Setup Steps Create a category under Admin->Categories and use your CEC ID as the category. Create a runtime user under Account Keys. Click NEW ACCOUNT KEY, select HTTP Basic Authentication and fill out the information. The actual information does not matter. You can use test/test if you like. Click SUBMIT. Create a target under Targets. Click NEW TARGET, select HTTP Endpoint and fill out the information. Set DEFAULT ACCOUNT KEYS to your user from #2. Select HTTPS protocol. Set the HOST/IPADDRESS to jsonplaceholder.typicode.com. Set the PORT to 443 and select DISABLE SERVER CERTIFICATE VALIDATION. Click SUBMIT. Create another target under Targets. Click NEW TARGET, select SMTP Target and fill out the information. Under DEFAULT ACCOUNT KEYS click the Add New option and use your CEC email/CEC Password. Then select that user. Set the SMTP SERVER to outbound.cisco.com and set the SMTP PORT to 25.   Let's Create a Basic Workflow   Create a new workflow under Workflows. Click NEW WORKFLOW. Go down the right side and select your category under the CATEGORY drop down. Under Variables click ADD VARIABLE. For the first variable Select Data Type as String. Display Name as path and SCOPE as Input. Set the value or default as users. Click SAVE. Click ADD VARIABLE again. Select Data Type as String. Display Name as output json and SCOPE as Output. Click SAVE. Continue down to Target. Select Execute On This Target and then select HTTP Endpoint under the TARGET TYPE drop down and then select your target under the TARGET drop down. Search for http in your toolbox and drag and drop the HTTP Request activity. This is the basic activity to make any API call. Click on the HTTP Request activity. Change the DISPLAY NAME to GET JSONPATH. Scroll down to RELATIVE URL. Click the puzzle-piece icon(or insert variable reference) and a new dialog should appear called Browse Variables. Click Workflow, then Input, then you should see your path variable. Click it and then click SAVE. You should now see a VARIABLE REFERENCE showing in your RELATIVE URL field. Set METHOD to GET. Scroll down and set the CONTENT TYPE to JSON. Search for the Set Variables activity. Drag and down it BELOW your GET JSONPATH activity. Change the DISPLAY NAME to Set Output. Click ADD. For VARIABLE TO UPDATE, click the insert variable reference icon, and browse to your output variable. Workflow->Output->output json. Click SAVE. For VARIABLE VALUE NEW, click the insert variable reference icon. Now browse to Activities, then your activity GET JSONPATH, then select Body. Click SAVE. Create a new variable of type Integer and call it Status Code. It should be an output scope. Add your new variable to the Set Output activity. Click ADD below your first entry and set your Status Code Variable to the value in Activities->GET JSONPATH->Status code. Validate the workflow and run it. See what your variables are set to.   Let's get it running in layered!!! Exit your current workflow and create a new one called "Master" or similar Scroll down and select Execute On This Target. Select HTTP ENDPOINT as the TARGET TYPE and then select your JSONPATH holder target in the TARGET select. Drag and drop your workflow to your canvas. It should look a little different. Add an input variable call name of type string. Find the JSONPath Query activity. Drag and drop it below your atomic workflow in the MASTER workflow. On the JSONPath Query activity, click insert variable reference and point it to the output of your previous activity. This should be Activites->Your Activity->output json. Click SAVE. Scroll down and click ADD below JSONPATH QUERIES. Leave the PROPERTY TYPE as String. Make the PROPERTY NAME be name and make the JSONPATH QUERY be $.[?(@.username==“<input name>)]. Select the checkbox for CONTINUE WORKFLOW EXECUTION ON FAILURE Go the middle icon in your toolbox, this is the Program Logic or Flow Control area. Find the Condition Block and drag and drop it below your JSONPath Query. Click the Condition Block in your canvas and change the Display Name to If found name. Click on the left most CONDITION BRANCH and you should see the conditional dialog. Under CONDITION, title it THEN, then select the insert variable reference icon for the first field and map it to Activity->JSONPath Query->Succeeded. This is a boolean value that tells us if the activity succeeded or not. Select Equals in the second field and then type true into the last field. Click on the other CONDITION BRANCH, and do the same as #5, but set the last field to false. Title this block ELSE. This will work because the JSONPath query activity will error if it does not find what you are looking for. Search for the EMAIL activity. Drag and drop it into the left CONDITION BRANCH blocks. On the email activity, go to Target and select Override Workflow Target. Select your SMTP server from above. Scroll down and input your email into the TO field. Input something into the SUBJECT line and something into the MESSAGE field. Something like We found them! On your email block, click the ... and select duplicate. Drag the duplicate over to the other CONDITION BRANCH. (Your else branch) Change the SUBJECT and MESSAGE to reflect not finding the person. Validate and run the workflow. Search for bill. Did it email you? Now run again and search for Bret.   This is a great lab that I adapted from some things I built before but I hope you were able to get through it!!! If you run into issues or have questions, please post below. As always, I have a VOD to go along with this of course :) .... now.... ONTO THE VIDEO!   Play recording Password: JiEUHzy2    Standard End-O-Blog Disclaimer:   Thanks as always to all my wonderful readers and those who continue to stick with and use CPO and now those learning AO! I have always wanted to find good questions, scenarios, stories, etc... if you have a question, please ask, if you want to see more, please ask... if you have topic ideas that you want me to blog on, Please ask! I am happy to cater to the readers and make this the best blog you will find :)   AUTOMATION BLOG DISCLAIMER: As always, this is a blog and my (Shaun Roberts) thoughts on CPO, AO, CCS, orchestration, and automation, my thoughts on best practices, and my experiences with the products and customers. The above views are in no way representative of Cisco or any of it's partners, etc. None of these views, etc are supported and this is not a place to find standard product support. If you need standard product support please do so via the current call in numbers on Cisco.com or email tac@cisco.com   Thanks and Happy Automating!!!   --Shaun Roberts shaurobe@cisco.com ... View more

Howdy out there in automation land!!! I hope that the entry of a new product into our tool bet has excited you. If it has not yet, then you need to go back and read last month's blog post :) This time we begin a series that will take us back to the basics or pretty much back to school.... I liken it to this poster:       Minus the singing, dancing, and maybe the wedgies? In the next set of blogs including this one I will do a complete re-teach or first teach of Action Orchestrator(AO). I call it a re-teach because some will notice a lot of similarities in AO and CPO and will know many of the concepts already... however I want all those, especially all the new readers to get as much out of it as the old ones... so let's level set the community and go from there! Starting with what does everything mean in the UI?   Well... going down the left side or navigation bar we have: Workflows - These are the drag and dropped pieces of content or code that become your automations and orchestrations. These can be by themselves or linked together. You will have normal workflows and atomic workflows! Check out the VOD below for what an Atomic is. Runs - This shows which workflow have run and what their output has been. You will see all whether they are failed or succeeded... unless you deleted them! Targets - These are the endpoints or places you will connect to from AO. They could be routers, switches, OSes, Applications, APIs, Database, and so on Account Keys - These are the users that are attached to your targets. They give the target access to the endpoint Variables - These are the variables in the system, these specifically are the global and environment variables. Scope - This tells us where the variable is in the system. It is global, meaning that anything can access it, or is it local to a workflow. Type - This tells us what kind of variable it is. AO supports all the basic ones you would see in any language including string, date time, boolean, integer, decimal or floating point, and tables as an array structure. Calendars - This allows you to define calendars for scheduling workflows to run Schedules - This takes calendars and allows you to configure a recurring schedule to be attached to a workflow. If you want a workflow to run every hour on the hour starting at 12:00pm, then you configure a schedule for that and then attach it (via triggers) to your workflow. Events - These are all non-schedule based triggering mechanisms. These allow you to start workflows without having to click the "run" button. Out of the box we have Kafka Events, AMQP Events, and Email message monitoring. API Documentation - This is a built in Swagger page to help you make API calls into AO. Everything you do in the UI, can be done here too! Administration - This area allows you to configure security roles, Git Repos for workflow import/export, Managing schemas for use during Adapter Development, and to setup Categories to assign your workflows to. While not covered deeply in detail here, this area will be covered in upcoming blogs. So what does this all add up to? A great orchestration product!!! In the VOD we will dive a little deeper into each section, but not too deep... remember just the basics. With this product you will be able to take your business workflows, your complex automations, your massive pile of spaghetti code and put it into an easy to understand, easy to uptake, easy to develop into format. On top of that, in future blogs, I will teach you how to develop complex and useful worfkflows into your system and give you snippets of code to play with! Even give you access to git repos so you can import workflows directly into your environment..... no need to re-invent the wheel if it rolls well. Lastly when we get to more advanced things I will take you through custom adapter developing using Python. In that series will will look to write our own custom adapter into the system. Our own activities... our own targets... our own everything!! (or pretty darn close). I hope you look forward to what we have in store with this product and I hope those who are just checking this out... say "wait a minute" I want to try that product!   If you want more direct information on CloudCenter Suite Action Orchestrator, then I highly suggest... well this blog :P Oh and you can check out our product information too! :D   Product page: https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/cloud-systems-management/cloudcenter-suite/index.html Doc: https://docs.cloudcenter.cisco.com/display/ACTIONORCHESTRATOR/Action+Orchestrator+5.0+Home Cisco Data Sheet: https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/collateral/cloud-systems-management/cloudcenter-suite/datasheet-c78-741886.html   Well... I think that about does it for describing as much as I have... and now, your favorite part, my favorite part, the *WORLD'S* favorite part.... onto the video!!!!   VOD: Play recording Password: Vp9XUpMW  Length: 21 mins   Standard End-O-Blog Disclaimer:   Thanks as always to all my wonderful readers and those who continue to stick with and use CPO and now those learning AO! I have always wanted to find good questions, scenarios, stories, etc... if you have a question, please ask, if you want to see more, please ask... if you have topic ideas that you want me to blog on, Please ask! I am happy to cater to the readers and make this the best blog you will find :)   AUTOMATION BLOG DISCLAIMER: As always, this is a blog and my (Shaun Roberts) thoughts on CPO, AO, CCS, orchestration, and automation, my thoughts on best practices, and my experiences with the products and customers. The above views are in no way representative of Cisco or any of it's partners, etc. None of these views, etc are supported and this is not a place to find standard product support. If you need standard product support please do so via the current call in numbers on Cisco.com or email tac@cisco.com   Thanks and Happy Automating!!!   --Shaun Roberts shaurobe@cisco.com   ... View more

Howdy out there in Automation Land!!!! It has been too long since our last blog but so much has been going on, I have just not found the time to sit down and write about it.... but today. Today is the day we give you a sneak peek into the Next Generation of Cisco software. The Next Generation of what you have been watching/following my blogs for now for many years. The Next Generation of Cisco Process Orchestrator.... named Action Orchestrator (AO) under the CloudCenter Suite(CCS) of applications. So to celebrate and since it is revolutionary I will go with this movie poster...       Not too bad right? So of course, I will have a video demo (see below) and a quick walk though but let's talk about all the goodies you will see in the next gen product. And for anyone hitting up a Cisco Live... you can see these products there as well!  But wait... first let me remove any bad thoughts you might have... so This product is still the premiere in Workflow automation and Visual coding applications Current customers will be able to use it New customers will love it and begin to adopt it Cisco is working tirelessly to make sure the experience and components you had in CPO are ported and if you've never used CPO before... then you can start with AO from scratch, no worries! Good... that is out of the way :)   So first off, let us start with some of the major shifts/additions you will see coming from CPO. If you have not used CPO then just know these are great things! I will break each of these down a little bit as well. These are the things I find revolutionary with the product. They were features and functionality that people have asked for years and have finally come around. There are a multitude of other features and functions that make AO great, however I wanted to highlight a few here as they make a dramatic shift in the product and its architecture when compared to CPO. in future blogs we will talk more about other features, etc that would be of valid nature to know. No longer Windows dependent in any way. AO will run on any cloud, any platform, any OS... because it runs in Kubernetes! We now run the application as a bunch of micro-services inside of Kubernetes. This make the product much more agile and allows us to run on any platform. Windows, sure! CentOS/Insert Linux Flavor here --- you got it! Want to run it in the public cloud??? Well sure. AWS, GCP, AZURE, etc. It is fully up to you. Worried about Kubernetes? Do not be! The installer supports setting up Kubernetes from scratch for you! But it can also install to an existing Kubernetes setup if you have one.     A fully functional HTML based web client! You can now access your workflow editing and operational GUI via the web. It is exposed to you via a micro-service and is usable across multiple browser platforms. No need for a thick/fat client anymore.   The ability to develop your *OWN* adapters and plug them right into Action Orchestrator. You will be able to write your own adapters in the following languages: Python, GO, Java. All you will have to do is "teach" AO how to understand your adapter and then you can plug it right into the system and spin up your own adapter POD and you will be off and running. Dragging and dropping your OWN  custom made activities... really exciting stuff. This stuff is pretty complex of course and I will do a multi-part blog series on it. Lots to learn!!! In the below screenshot you can see the custom MySQL adapter I wrote running inside of the AO cluster.     Using this customer adapter I can drag and drop activities I create, targets I create, all under an adapter I own and create.   Upgrades are a breeze!!! Because Cisco will release updates to our container/docker repo, you will always have access to the latest and the greatest updates! And getting those updates is a cinch. You login to your administration dashboard, you see an update and you click the drop down to deploy it. The containers are downloaded and the services and pods relaunched on the fly for you. Minimal downtime for the latest code base. If you are fully on-prem... do not worry, we have the option for an on-prem repository as well to download from us and store for you. I do not plan to dive to deep into Cisco CloudCenter Suite Admin which houses AO, but we will in future blogs.       Well... that is about it for the text, which I know you like, but really LOVE the videos... so onto the video!!! Please post questions/comments below or feel free to email me. If you would like a personal demo, please email me.   Play recording (20 min 18 sec) Recording password: Srw4PRns   Standard End-O-Blog Disclaimer:   Thanks as always to all my wonderful readers and those who continue to stick with and use CPO. Big things are on the horizon and I hope that you will continue to use CPO and find great uses for it! If you have a really exciting automation story, please email me it! (see below) I would love to compile some stories and feature customers or individual stories in an upcoming blog!!!   AUTOMATION BLOG DISCLAIMER: As always, this is a blog and my (Shaun Roberts) thoughts on CPO, AO and automation, my thoughts on best practices, and my experiences with the product and customers. The above views are in no way representative of Cisco or any of it's partners, etc. None of these views, etc are supported and this is not a place to find standard product support. If you need standard product support please do so via the current call in numbers on Cisco.com or email tac@cisco.com   Thanks and Happy Automating!!!   --Shaun Roberts shaurobe@cisco.com ... View more