Back-to-Back Posts!

Hey, what can I say? I have to crank through these “refresh topics” somehow. ;)

So, here we go, the fifth “real” post after my introduction…and this post and its associated deliverable is dedicated to the:

Orchestrator Integration Pack for Standard Logging 1.2

History

As we all know (or you will in a second) Opalis Integration Server (and now Orchestrator) does not have a simple out of the box way to store state. While there are logs, they likely will be turned off (verbose logging anyway) in production, and those really do not cover state information anyway – not in the way you want state to be stored (and subsequently accessed).

So, what did we do before this fancy Integration Pack born back in the days of Opalis Integration Server and the Quick Integration Kit?

We created an external data store. This took the form of a text file, SQL database table(s), carrier pigeon, etc. It also meant creating the necessary calls to read/write to and from these sources.

One day we (the Opalis Software field team) got fed up with these archaic methods (as well as walking up hill both ways on the way to school) and decided to design a “standard way to log and retrieve data for OIS”. From these plans rose a new era of Standard OIS Logging. It was used across the country and throughout the world - storing millions and millions of records of data along the way (so much so I had to modify the code a couple revisions back to accommodate a bigger Int data type)!

Heck, it basically wrapped up a bunch of SQL commands for reads and writes, providing the Runbook author a few simple fields to pass data into and read data from – voila!

Fun Fact: As of the publication of this post, the Orchestrator Integration Pack for Standard Logging 1.2 and its documentation have been downloaded 3088 times from its previous home on CodePlex.

Relevance Today

So, is this a worthwhile download and install for you? Maybe, maybe not. If your currently logging system works just fine within Orchestrator, you can probably skip this one. If not, and you are looking for a Standard Logging methodology with the ability to restart Runbooks based on logs – this may be the Integration Pack solution for you.

Let’s take a look at the available activities within this Integration Pack:

• Start
• Success
• Warning
• Failure
• End
• Restart
• Get Log data

The activities are what you might imagine from a logging solution intended to be baked directly into a set of Runbooks.

Usage

Please refer to the available and included User Guide and Usage Guide for configuration instructions, example usage and troubleshooting notes. Oh, and for more information on older versions of this Integration Pack, please refer to the following CodePlex post. Oh x2, if you are interested in classic film, check out the original 2011 blog post complete with demo video!

Download

Click here for the TechNet Gallery Contribution for this Integration Pack!

enJOY!