Parse Orchestrator Export Tool Now Available

Many times when using Orchestrator it’s best practice to have multiple Orchestrator environments in place. One for development/testing and another for production.

However, exporting a Runbook and importing it into another Orchestrator requires some additional attention. So many times a third Orchestrator environment is needed in order to ‘sanitize’ the exported Runbooks before importing them into the production environment. I already blogged about it, to be found here (last bullet).

However, it involves many steps, preparation and some good discipline as well. Otherwise the Orchestrator environment used for sanitizing exported Runbooks isn’t ‘sterile’ anymore, resulting in Runbooks with unexpected behavior.

Therefore it’s good news the Parse Orchestrator Export Tool is finally available for download! What it does? Taken directly from the SCORCH Dev blog: ‘…is a GUI application that looks at exports from your Orchestrator environment and allows you to perform multiple actions on them before re-importing them into the same environment or another Orchestrator Environment…’

Primary functions (also taken from the same blog):

Display a Graphical Representation of an Export We use this internally while doing change control to ensure that all Global Configurations are properly configured in the destination Orchestrator Environment Sanitize Export This will remove all un-referenced global Settings and Configurations http://blogs.technet.com/b/orchestrator/archive/2012/05/15/3497985.aspx http://opalis.wordpress.com/2013/04/11/parse-orchestrator-export-tool/ Apply Link Best Practices Modifies the links of an export to give them appropriate names and colors http://opalis.wordpress.com/2013/04/12/orchestrator-link-best-practices/ Set Max Parallel Allows for Bulk setting of Runbook Job Concurrency http://opalis.wordpress.com/2013/04/17/bulk-set-orchestrator-max-policy-requests/ Turn On / Off Generic Logging Turns Off or On Generic Logging for All Runbooks http://opalis.wordpress.com/2013/04/11/parse-orchestrator-export-tool/ Turn On / Off Object Specific Logging Turns Off or On Object Specific Logging for All Runbooks http://opalis.wordpress.com/2013/04/11/parse-orchestrator-export-tool/ Analyze Export Iterates through the Export File and checks for common misconfigurations Multiple Link objects between the same source and destination objects Trigger Policies that do not have all of the input parameters for the target policy defined Modify Name Changes the name of any Runbook / Folder / Object / Global Configuration

So this tool is a MUST HAVE for anyone involved with Orchestrator. Good to know this tool is available for FREE.

Tool can be downloaded from Codeplex. The blog SCORCH Dev has written an excellent posting about this tool and shows some examples as well. Posting to be found here.