Working with Turbonomic Actions change requests

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The Turbonomic product continually analyzes your environment. This holistic analysis identifies problems in your environment and the actions that you can take to resolve issues and avoid problems before they occur.

Your ServiceNow Change Management application provides an approach to control the lifecycle of changes that you make to specific Configuration Items (CIs) in your environment. The Turbonomic administrator configures the Turbonomic product to identify the CIs it manages, and which specific actions it passes to ServiceNow as Change Requests (CRs). Turbonomic Actions enters each of these actions in as an entry in the Approvals list. From there you can inspect the related entities, and browse to the CR.

After you browse to a CR, you can then use the ServiceNow Change Management application to move the CR into its different states. When you move the CR into the Scheduled state, then Turbonomic can run the action – Either immediately, or at the scheduled time for that action.

GUI Actions approvals Overview
Note:

The Turbonomic Actions Approvals view can list different actions for different types of CIs. CIs map to Entity Types in the Turbonomic platform. For a listing of actions per entity type, see Actions by Entity Type in the Turbonomic User Guide.

Each approval record includes the following information:

  • Action OID

    An identifier for this action in ServiceNow. Click the OID to open the approval record, which shows extra information, including Turbonomic data such as:

    • Category – The action category; can be one of Performance, Prevention, Efficiency, or Compliance.

    • Type – Can be one of Placement, Right_Size, Start, Stop, Delete, or Configuration.

    • Risk – An indicator that shows the impact of the action, where 2000 is the maximum. The higher the risk, the more benefit you get out of running the action.

  • Description

    A description of the action, including the type of action this change runs.

  • Change Request

    The identifier for the associated CR. Click the entry to open the CR record.

  • State

    The current state for the action, which can be one of the following values:

    • PENDING APPROVAL –

      The action is generated, and Turbonomic is waiting to run it.

    • APPROVED –

      The action is approved, and Turbonomic can run it. If the action has a scheduled window, then execution occurs then.

    • REJECTED –

      The action is rejected, and Turbonomic discarded it.

    • WAITING_FOR_EXEC –

      The action is approved, and Turbonomic is waiting for the execution schedule (in the Turbonomic policy) to open.

    • WAITING_FOR_CR_SCHEDULE –

      The action is approved, but the CR has a specified schedule window. Turbonomic is waiting for the CR schedule window to open so it can run the action.

      Note:

      If you configured an execution schedule in the Turbonomic policy for actions of this type, ensure that the Turbonomic schedule window matches the CR schedule window. Incompatible scheduling can result in the action never running.

    • IN_PROGRESS –

      Turbonomic is running the action.

    • SUCCEEDED –

      Turbonomic ran the action and returned success.

    • FAILED –

      Turbonomic ran the action and returned failure.

    • MISSED –

      The conditions that the action are meant to address are no longer present. Running this action is no longer necessary. If the conditions arise later, Turbonomic generates a new CR.

      Note:

      For an action approval that is marked as MISSED, Turbonomic Actions does not change the CR from that state. It is up to your organization to move such a CR into a different state. For example, you can implement a business rule to find all MISSED action approvals and mark them correctly.

    • REPLACED –

      Turbonomic decided to replace the action with a new one. The replaced action is no longer recommended.

  • Related CI

    The ServiceNow CI that is d by this CR. Click the entry to see the CI record.

  • Source Entity

    For actions that are based on an existing entity, the initial entity. For example, when you move a VM to a different host, this entity is the host the VM moves from. For a provision VM action, you copy this VM to provision the new VM.

    Note: In the rare case that two Move actions for the same VM have different source entities, these actions share the same OID. For more information, see Action OIDs for Move actions from the same source entity

  • Count

    How often Turbonomic recommended this same action.

  • Destination Entity

    For move actions, the entity you move to. For example, when you move a VM to a different host, this entity is the host the VM moves to.

  • Savings

    The estimated saving or cost for the specified action. When Turbonomic calculates a saving or cost for the associated action, the CR can display that value. For a required investment, for example, when you are provisioning a new entity or scaling up an entity, this CR shows a negative saving.

    These costs are expressed as USD per month.

  • Metric

    The resource this action changes. For example, on a VM the action can change resources such as VMEM, VCPU, VStorage, or IOPS.

  • Turbonomic Entity

    A description of the entity that Turbonomic idiscovers and manages. Click the entry to open the record. From that record, you can view the matching ServiceNow CI.

  • From

    The initial amount of the resource that is indicated in the Metric field.

  • To

    The amount of the resource the entity will have after the action runs.

  • Updated

    When the record was last posted or changed.

Processing the change request

Each record in the Approvals view includes a Change Request field that shows the CR Number. To view the CR and to move it to different states, click the CR Number.

Standard Change Request

This CR is standard, according to the CRs you defined in your Change Management application. You can edit it or move it into different states as you would for any CR.

To accept the change and pass execution approval to Turbonomic, move the change to the Scheduled state.

Execution schedule synchronization

When a Turbonomic action is created and sent to ServiceNow, action details are represented using the ActionDTO, which includes information such as the execution schedule. For actions that are still progressing through the approval and scheduling workflow, the execution schedule displayed in ServiceNow reflects the current execution schedule configured in Turbonomic. This applies when the action is in one of the following states:
  • Approved
  • Pending Approval
  • Waiting for Change Request (CR) Schedule
As long as the action remains in these states, any updates to the execution schedule in Turbonomic are reflected in the execution schedule field of the ActionDTO. This ensures that ServiceNow presents an accurate view of when the action is expected to run. Once the action moves beyond these states and execution is complete, the execution schedule is no longer updated.

Issues to consider

As you work with CRs for Turbonomic actions, consider the following points:

  • Multiple CRs for the Same Heap Resize Action:

    For Heap Resize actions, Turbonomic can generate multiple CRs for the same action. If that occurs, accept the latest CR and ignore the previous ones. The unaccepted CRs ultimately change to the MISSED state.

    For Heap Resize actions, Turbonomic uses an increment, and generates a resize by that increment. The default increment is 128 MB. For example, if you need to increase heap by 240 MB, Turbonomic generates two separate actions at different times. The first action to increase by 128 MB and the second action to increase to the full 240 MB. This process creates two separate CRs. Manage the second CR, and let the first one change to MISSED.

  • Actions That Turbonomic Cannot Automate:

    In some circumstances, Turbonomic generates an action that it cannot run automatically, and sends it to ServiceNow to generate a CR. In this case, when the CR is approved Turbonomic does not run the action, and after 24 hours the CR state changes to MISSED.

    This behavior is expected. Acceptable reasons exist for the action to be one that Turbonomic cannot run. For example, the action can be of a type that Turbonomic cannot automate, but you configured a policy to send the action to ServiceNow. In this case, send the action manually:

    • Run the action outside of Turbonomic.

    • Close the CR related to this action.

    • Close the related Action Approval record.

  • Action OIDs for Move actions from the same source entity

    When Turbonomic computes the OID for Move actions, it does not take the source entity into account. As a result, in the rare case that two Move actions for the same VM have different source entities, these actions have the same OID. For example, an action to move VM_1 from Host A to Host B has the same OID as an action to move VM_1 from Host C to Host B. If the first action is sent for approval to ServiceNow, the second one is not sent over for approval until the first one is approved and executed.

Viewing the affected configuration instance (CI)

Each action record includes an entry for the Related CI in your environment. To view the CI details, click the CI identifier.

Standard ServiceNow Configuration Instance

This CI is a standard ServiceNow CI that you can inspect to see the image path, other information about the entity, and a list of related items.