5 Steps to success…

whoosh ivants is a great add-on for ivanti Service Management, but what do I need to do in order to take advantage of it? Will there be a risk to my existing configuration? Let me answer those questions for you.

We, the people working at freedom manufaktur, know how important it is to have a seamless integration into existing infrastructure and we take pride in delivering a solution which has a minimal risk and can be installed within minutes. You don’t need to become an expert of whoosh ivants – it just works.

Step 1 – Installing add-on for ivanti Service Management

Our solution whoosh ivants does extend your ivanti ITSM by adding and only adding new business objects. No existing object will be modified in any way. You can rest assured, that you can remove whoosh ivants at any time without loosing any of your data.

At the current version 2017.1 (1.2.0) of whoosh ivants, we will be adding 4 new Business Objects, 1 new Validation Object, 1 new Picklist and 2 new Roles. After the import of an ivanti package (.MetadataPatch file) into your Service Management platform you will gain access to a new user interface specifically designed for whoosh ivants administrators. In the following example I have added Martin to the “whoosh ivants Administrator” role (1). He now has access to the business objects relevant for whoosh ivants (2). Additionally we have already added our first application template (3) which we will have a closer look at.

Step 2 – Setting up templates and choosing a machine to run on

If you ask your IT department: “What are the most common tasks that you apply to users machines?”, you are probably getting a list of simple and repetitive tasks. Typically this includes:

  • Flushing the DNS cache (Problem with connectivity, especially when traveling)
  • Clearing the browser cache (Problem with a web application)
  • Emptying the recycle bin (Not enough space on the users machine)
  • Fixing Remote Desktop access (Helping the user by interacting directly with his/her machine)

All of those and more tasks have something in common. They can be fully automated by running a script or application on the machine. Each of those applications can be configured as a whoosh ivants application template. This allows you to configure your specific set of quick fixes and common solutions to problems you need in your IT department. It also adds a layer of security as this list is only available to administrators and is read-only for everyone else. This ensures that no unwanted applications or scripts can be executed through whoosh ivants.

Continuing the example displayed above, we have defined a template which will call the application C:\Windows\System32\ipconfig.exe with the parameter /flushdns on any given machine. To select one or more machines to run the application on, we are going to switch to the “Applications” tab of set template (1). Select “New Run external application” (2) and specify the machine to run on (3).

With these simple steps everything is ready to go.

You might be wondering now, how the machine “nb-martin” will know of this task. Which is what we are going to talk about now

Step 3 – Enabling machines to talk whoosh ivants

Every machine that should be addressable by whoosh ivants needs to have the whoosh ivants Agent installed. This small application runs as a service in the background and periodically checks for new tasks. When your company consists of a large number of workstations or you don’t want the whoosh ivants Agents to talk to ivanti directly, you can use the whoosh ivants Controller as a proxy. In this scenario all agents will connect to the controller, which will be the only application to connect to ivanti. For demonstration purposes we will install controller and agent on the same machine.

The whoosh ivants Controller and Agent are available as installation packages which are installed with literally 3 clicks. They come with a configuration UI that allows your IT to easily set up the required information. In this example, we are setting up the Controller with the connection to ivanti Service Management and the agent with a connection to the controller.

Automated deployment of whoosh ivants

Now that we are confident about installing the whoosh ivants Agent (and Controller), we probably want to automate the installation of the agent inside our IT infrastructure. A manual deployment to hundreds of machines would be rather time consuming. That is why we created a UI-less version of the installation (.msi file). Those installation packages can be deployed via Active Directory Policies or any other software distribution solution. The settings we have set earlier are stored in a simple .json file and should also be deployed to the target machines. You can find more information in the Installation Guide.

Step 4 – Monitoring whoosh ivants add-on for ivanti Service Management

With everything set up, the whoosh ivants Agent will now execute our task that we defined earlier. Since the agent runs in the background, we are getting no visual feedback about the status directly on the machine. But everything that happens specifically for the task will be sent back to ivanti.

Within ivanti Service Management we can now either view all the log messages specific to one application (1) or all log messages (2). We can also see that the state changed to “Completed” and the exit code was 0 (3). An exit code value of 0 generally indicates a success while everything else represents an error code.

Step 5 – Let your creativity flow

With whoosh ivants you now have a powerful tool at your hand, which you can use however you see fit. Want to run specific tasks on one machine, you can do that. You want to use workflows to create tasks for multiple machine, no problem. You might also want to create QuickActions for your Service requests to immediately start certain tasks on a users machine. All of that is possible and more. From the standpoint of ivanti Service Management all you need to do is create a new business object with the application template and machine name and you are ready to go.

Please tell us, which things you solved with whoosh ivants, write us an email to thanks@ivants and our engaged people can feel the appreciation out there by your feedback 🙂

You can buy the whoosh ivants add-on for ivanti Service Management directly from this website or get into contact with us if you have any questions.