How to Search Config Items by their associated Maintenance Window?

[Brett Zipkin]

If I create a maintenance window and associate it to a number of config items, how do I then search using the Maintenance Window as a criteria.

 

The idea being, I want to put a change ticket in and add the config items that are associated to a specific maintenance window to that ticket.  There could be hundreds of config items.  Since the relationship goes through the ci_window table to the window table, is this possible when in a config item search?

[Jon_Israel]

Hi Brett,

One thought here based on some discussions I had with some folks on our side is to use a "Technical Service CI" and then relate the CIs to the technical service CI.  Then when you do the maintenance window, you would only have to link the the Technical Service CI to it which makes for much easier management.

There may be other folks out here on the community that have done this in a different way as well and they may be willing to share that with you

Thanks, and have a great weekend!

Jon I.

[Brett Zipkin]

Jon,

   We have a PAM process that takes servers and network devices out of monitoring during windows when they are being worked so that incident tickets don't get cut by UIM and NSM if a service or box is rebooted.  This is used in small circumstances like an app team that needs to make a change to 1 or 2 servers during a CAB change or large circumstances where a quarterly patch window is going to reboot a few hundred servers.   The list of devices that it's based on is coming from the config item list of the change ticket.

 

  Right now it's difficult for those creating these tickets to select all of the servers that will be in a quarterly patch window because there is no clean way to flag them all.  I wanted to make a Maintenance Window in SD, associate the assets to it and then use it as a filter criteria so I could, from the chg ticket search for all assets in Quarterly Maintenence Window 1 then add all.  Boom, done.   but since it's a many to many relationship, I'm not sure if there is a way to perform that search from the ticket.

 

I'll be honest, I don't know what a Technical Service CI is or how it works so I'm curious how that works, but I can guarantee my PAM process doesn't take it into account right now and I was hoping not to have to re-write it.  If it's a minor change in logic, it may be acceptable but at the moment without knowing how that works, I don't really know.  Management has proposed adding a custom field to the config item table(s) to store the window info and that's certainly doable but if I don't have to add a custom field, I'd rather not.

[Carol Piccus]

Brett -

 

A Technical Service CI is a CI with a family of Service and a class of Technical. This is a logical CI that would be added/managed to the CMDB manually.

 

The PAM process can ignore the existence of this CI on the CO by checking that the CI in the process step is not a Family of Service.

 

Carol

[Brett Zipkin]

But in reality it wouldn't be that I had to ignore it, I'd have to change the PAM code to loop through all assets associated to it so they could be unmanaged properly.

 

Therefore I'd have to experiment with how to associate the assets to the Tech CI and then figure out what the appropriate web services were to capture all of the associated CIs.   I'm not saying it's a bad solution, however it does come with more administrative overhead to start using it then simply being able to sort by the maintenance window defined.  Especially since we want to integrate some other tools into our process to maintain the lists automatically.

[Brett Zipkin]

Just for testing purposes I created a New Config Item, class Technical and the Family loaded as Contact and Read-Only.  So I don't seem to be able to make a CI as you describe above.

[Michael Mueller]

Hi Brett.

if you know the name of the maintenance window ,lets say its "monthly patches", you may enter the following into the

"Additional Search Arguments" search field when searching for ci's:

window.window.sym='monthly patches'

This should give you all (active) CI's which have this maintenance window assigned.

I know this is not that much convinient, but at least a starting point.

The best thing would be to create a search lookup field for maintenance windows in the CI search filter, which will use this wherclause part in the background. But this takes some time to figure out ,if and how this could be done...

Hope this helps.

Regards

.............Michael

[Brett Zipkin]

Mike,

  Thanks.  I tested that and it does work.  So I tried 2 things in Web Screen painter to create that search lookup field and make life easier on the user.

 

1. A regular text field defined like this
   • <PDM_MACRO name=sfTextbox hdr="Window Name" attr="window.window.sym">
2. A lookup field defined like this
   • <PDM_MACRO name=sfLookup hdr="Maintenance Window" attr="window.window" factory="window">

 

The first one works but requires the searcher to know the name of the window.  If his/her wild card search happens to include multiple windows, due to similar naming conventions, they'll get too many results and may not realize it.

 

The second one appears to work at first.  The lookup works correctly, the right search window comes up.  I can select the window I want.  But then when I actually hit search it returns all assets and in the stdlogs I get the following error:  nr::window is not an atomic data type.  Even weirder, if I then show the filter again, I still see the string filled in.  If I hit Search a 2nd time this error pops up:   Parse error at : "delete_flag = 0 AND is_ci = 1 AND window.window LIKE 0" (Non string used in LIKE where clause)

 

Shouldn't using the lookup generate the equivalent search code like window.window = 400001  or something?  Because while nobody would ever know that number, that syntax also works in the additional search arguments.

 

Thoughts?