Cisco Cisco Process Orchestrator 3.0 User Guide

When the incident in Process Orchestrator is closed, if the process in the network best practice 
automation pack blocked, it can continue. For example, the process might go on to prove that the 
problem that generated the incident in fact no longer manifests, closing the loop to prove that the 
remediation did in fact fix the problem. 

With this abstraction, the network best practice automation pack does not need to be dependent on the 
specifics of which service desk is involved, and no dependency exists between the automation packs.

Human interaction tasks are steps in a workflow where a human needs to take action. They include 
Approval, Input Request, Guided Operation, and Review tasks. 

Approval tasks consist of steps where the workflow needs someone’s indication of what route to 
take. They may be simple yes or no questions, or they might give any arbitrary set of choices.

Guided Operation tasks consist of steps in a workflow that someone must perform manually. For 
example, a step in a network automation workflow might be to replace a cable. While this step 
cannot be automated, it might be a small part of an overall workflow that can be automated.

Review tasks allow the assignment of a document or automation summary review. When someone 
indicates the review is complete, the workflow can continue. Moreover, the person who indicated 
they completed the review is recorded in auditing. Many systems might send a notification to let 
someone know that they need to, for example, look at a report, but do not close the loop to see that 
the review actually occurred. Process Orchestrator allows closing the loop.

Input Request tasks allow gathering data as the workflow executes.

Process Orchestrator processes, tasks and several other elements of the functional model can be placed 
into categories. Categories in Process Orchestrator work just like Microsoft Outlook categories with 
respect to tagging objects for grouping in the UI. Objects such as processes can be in multiple categories. 
For example, a process can be both a network best practice and a security best practice.

Categories are fundamentally used to make visibility easier. For example, in process definitions views 
or views of running processes users can filter the view by a category.

Categories can reference other categories in a hierarchical fashion, in that they can include objects in 
subcategories.

Task rules provide a list of rules that act on new tasks or task changes to handle cases such as 
assignments, changing alert or incident severities, or setting customer-specific categories on tasks. They 
provide an easy-to use, simple, yet powerful mechanism for routine activities customers need to perform 
for alerts, incidents, and other tasks. This feature allows the management of tasks created within Cisco 
automation packs without requiring that customers understand or change the automation pack itself. By 
performing these actions by rule, one change can affect tasks created by multiple processes. For example, 
it is possible to assign all SAP Incidents to a single person with a single rule.