Change Management
FlexDeploy provides integration with various Service Management tools for both Change Management and Incident Management
Change Management - Create new change tickets or link to existing change tickets, and bind them to an automated approval for ad-hoc execution or within a pipeline
Incident Management - Automatically create incidents whenever a deployment or pipeline stage fails
Features and Use Cases
The Change Management System integration provides rich features and enables a number of powerful use cases to further integrate and automate the DevOps lifecycle.
Out of the box integrations with a few popular change management systems
Associate existing CMS tickets with deployment requests or pipeline stage executions
Automatically create change tickets (whether for adhoc deployment requests or as part of a pipeline)
Define the ticket fields and map their values to provide context
Bind deployment request approvals or pipeline approvals to the status of the linked ticket(s). Automatic approval in FlexDeploy when the linked ticket in the CMS is approved.
Use one ticket per release, one ticket snapshot, or even one ticket per project/package in the snapshot.
Propagate the ticket numbers across pipeline stages to avoid duplication data entry by users.
Utilize Outgoing Webhooks to automatically create Service Management Incidents when deployments or pipeline stage executions fail.
Deployment report data is tied back to the CMS ticket number for auditing
Framework to include to enable all these features or other CMS Systems via custom integrations.
Change Management System can be viewed from, the Administration → Integrations→ Change Management Systems menu item. There are number of integrations available out of box, or you can define custom change management system.
Terminology
FlexDeploy Term | Description |
|---|---|
Change Management System | Defines the system used to ensure that changes are managed in a cohesive way, ensuring frequent checks and balances around user impact, corporate policies, regulatory compliance, security, etc. and to establish and support the implemented enterprise operational model. ServiceNow, BMC Remedyforce, Freshworks Freshservice, and Jira ITSM are available out of box, but you can add a custom integration using a Java or Groovy implementation. |
Change Management System Instance | Instance represent the physical connection details of the Change Management System. |
Property | Properties are used to define the inputs necessary to connect to the system, |
Out of box Change Management Systems
Step-by-step guide
If you want to configure ServiceNow, BMC Remedyforce, Freshworks Freshservice, or Jira ITSM then you can use out of box change management systems, otherwise you need to define Custom Change Management System.
Configure Change Management System Instance, which allows for configurations like server, credentials, etc. to interact with specific change management system.
If you want to deploy projects individually with change management integration,
Create external approval requirement on necessary folder, configurations will be inherited by all projects under this folder and it’s sub-folders. See Change Management Approvals on Folders.
Now you are ready to submit deployment for project. See how to submit executions with change tickets.
Otherwise, you can also configure change management at Release level and use External Approval Gate in specific stage of pipeline. When using pipelines, the CMS configuration defined on folders is ignored, since the configuration from the External Approval Gates themselves is used . See Creating/Editing a Pipeline Version for details regarding the External Approval Gate.
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