Creating an automated monthly report on assets

[Ben]

Hi,

Using a server based instance, i need to create a monthly report for assets that have licenses expiring at the end of the month.

Im not familiar with insight's ability for this.

Can it be done on jira's automation? Can i create an IQL filter with a subscription?

Any thoughts or guidance?

[Alex van Vucht (GLiNTECH) · Accepted solution]

The practice around licenses are not well articulated in Insight. Companies deliberately obfuscate licensing to make it harder to compare their licenses against competitor licenses, so it's hard to sayn

You've tagged this question as cloud, and this is easier to do in Insight Cloud because of the automation rules and the scheduled actions trigger. However you've asked for server, and Server has an in-built automation engine that is designed for questions like this. Our managed services team uses this rule:

1. Scheduled event (cron)
2. IQL Query: objectType = License and "Expiry Date" < now(30d) and status = Active and not connectedTickets(status = Unresolved and summary = "Expiring license")
3. Create Jira Issue:
   1. Summary: Expiring License
   2. Issue type: Task
   3. Insight object field: Insight object/s

Hope that gives you enough of an idea of how to use server automation for this.

[Ben]

@Alex van Vucht (GLiNTECH)  haven't tried it yet, but it looks solid! Thanks!

When you mention iql query, is that under branch or the query section of the scheduled trigger ?

[Alex van Vucht (GLiNTECH)]

Server Insight automation is like Service Desk legacy automation. The Insight automation screen has three columns: first is the trigger, the second is the 'if', the third is the action. That is, the second is for, "If there are any results for this IQL query", then do the associated action in the third column, which in this case is Create a Jira issue.

A created Jira issue is a better than a report: it conveys all the information of an email, except it's actionable.

For reference of cloud people, here's how to do the same thing in cloud: you may find in Cloud that Automation expects you to be working with an issue and won't let you make an object search. So you will have to create an issue first, and auto-close it if nothing found. Consider instead:

1. Scheduled event trigger
2. Action: Create issue: "Daily search for expiring licenses"
3. Branch: For the most recent created issue:
   1. Action: Lookup Objects: select an Insight Object/s field on the issue to save the results
      • IQL query: along the lines of abovee
   2. Condition: Advanced Compare: if {{lookupObjects.size}} equals 0
   3. Action: Transition issue to resolved
      • Resolution: Done
      • Description: No outstanding expiring licenses found

If you want to learn more about automations, there is a paid training course for it. Insight automations are so new that there aren't any training materials yet. Welcome, and good luck!