Recurring Maintenance

Introduction

I prefer to enable others appropriately to be able to get their job done. The last thing I prefer is being the bottleneck for anyone to get their job done. That is the reason why I’m passionate about IT right?

The company I was working for was on the “Dublin” release when in a short amount of time 3 groups wanted to be able to set up maintenance schedules to perform various types of routine inspections. I looked at the Planned Maintenance application for whether it could be used cooperatively by different user groups and have the capacity to partition and maintain each group’s schedule by location. In Dublin, you were constrained by targeting configuration items (CIs) and it only serviced one single user group - i.e. IT operations.

Being fascinated with how the job scheduler was constructed, I set out to see how I could create extensions off of the job scheduler for other purposes than general ServiceNow operations and be able to delegate schedule administration. Using this use case scenario and the existing monolithic scheduler as a base to extend and provide the needed delegation to operational admins. The details are shown below in the “Presentation to Houston SNUG” over how I did this.

References below are for the articles I used and a presentation I made to share using the scheduler in what we called “IT Facilities”:

• SN Wiki Article - “Creating a Scheduled Job”
• SN Community Blog - “Scheduled jobs set adrift”
• Presentation to Houston SNUG
• IT Facilities User Guide