Orchestrator

When automated systems go wrong you may need to cancel a backlog of pending or running Orchestrator jobs directly with SQL.

For reference, the StatusId field from Orchestrator’s Job table provides the current status of the job.  These numeric represent:

0 = Pending

1 = Running

2 = Failed

3 = Cancelled

4 = Completed

The script may be run directly with SQL Management Studio.

This example uses PowerShell to call an Orchestrator runbook and display the results.

To demonstrate the scripting, I have created a simple runbook that will accept a string input.  It’s titled “Input1”.

There can be many reasons for needing site specific data related to an IP address.  I had a recent requirement for Orchestrator to configure machines when the only input was the IP Address of the target machine.   This solution uses PowerShell to compare an IP Address to an XML based lookup table of site information.  By finding the right site, other locale details can be used through Orchestrator.  The XML below represents the site information needed by my particular process.

System Center Orchestrator has a built in activity for running SSH on remote machines.  You may find that working runbooks start failing on new distributions of linux or with hardened machines.

Orchestrator’s ssh is simply calling the command-line version of putty (called plink) from the C drive of the Runbook Server.  The executable is located in:

As Orchestrator is guaranteed to grow in importance for most Microsoft based organisations, the need to query the Configuration Manager database becomes more important as well. 

The Integration Pack for System Center 2012 Configuration Manager, distributed via Orchestrator, causes the loading of the SCCM admin console to crash on servers that have been distributed to.

Error specifics of the Admin Console crash are: