Scheduling Environments

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGhjoLXhd08

Efficient scheduling within Test Environment Management (TEM) is key for maximizing resource utilization, saving time, energy, and financial resources. Our Environment Scheduling capabilities integrate with Jira, relying on issues, custom fields, and approval workflows. After implementing your environment scheduling with Golive, you’ll experience the following benefits:

• Comprehensive Oversight: Our Event Management provides complete control over Bookings, Changes, and Blackouts, ensuring precise planning and decision-making.

• Smoother Operations: Automated Conflict Detection optimizes your workflow by identifying and and alerting users to scheduling conflicts, reducing manual oversight.

• Efficiency Boost: The Auto-approval Mechanism accelerates routine approvals, minimizing manual intervention and speeding up your workflow.

• Simplified Scheduling: Intelligent Auto-booking effortlessly manages dependencies between environments, making complex scheduling straightforward.

The Golive Scheduling solution effectively minimizes scheduling errors, ensuring optimal resource utilization.

Requirements

• You must be a Golive Administrator.

• Ensure that your Environments are already defined in Golive. Refer to our Get started documentation for detailed instructions.

• Ensure your Jira instance is configured with the relevant custom fields, issue types, screens, and workflows before completing the Golive Scheduling Configuration. Your Jira Administrator can refer to the Configure Jira for Scheduling article to learn best practices for this configuration.

Scheduling Configuration

To configure your scheduling, access the Scheduling Configuration section from the Golive Settings menu. This section is available to all Golive administrators.

Three predefined event types are available:

• Booking: Reserve an Environment for a specific activity without modifying its current state. Examples include scheduling an environment for a business demo or a User Acceptance Testing (UAT) session.

• Change: Modify the state of an Environment, such as deploying a new version or refreshing data. This includes deploying a new version of an application or refreshing data within the Environment.

• Blackout: Mark periods when an Environment is unavailable, often due to maintenance or freezes, where the Environment's configuration remains unchanged. For instance, an iso-prod Environment might be kept ready during blackout periods to replicate bugs in case of production incidents.

This centralized approach ensures consistent settings across Golive's features, including Scheduling Calendars and upcoming Environment Detail Panels to be shipped in a future release.

Your Scheduling Configuration supports both:

• Day fields: Jira Date custom fields

• Timestamp fields: Jira Timestamp or DateTime fields.

This setup is applied globally across your Scheduling Configuration and will affect all Event Types uniformly.

Event Type Configuration

Each event type has specific tabs dedicated to its configuration. In these tabs, you'll need to set up the following parameters:

• Enable [event type] scheduling: Toggle to enable/disable the event type.

• Jira Project: Select from the list of available Jira Projects.

• Issue Type: Choose from the available Issue Types configured in the selected Jira project.

[Jira Project] + [Issue Type] should be unique across all Event Types.

• Environment field: Select from the list of Golive Environment Fields present in the issue creation screen.

• Start time field: Choose from the list of Date or DateTime fields (depending on the scheduling scheme setup) present in the issue creation screen.

• End time field: Choose from the list of Date or DateTime fields (depending on the scheduling scheme setup) present in the issue creation screen.

• Conflict trigger status: Select from the list of statuses present in the issue workflow. When the Jira issue reaches this status, Golive will automatically detect potential conflicts.

• Confirmed statuses: Choose from the list of statuses present in the issue workflow. When the Jira issue is in those statuses, the request will be considered confirmed and taken into account for conflict detection.

• Link conflicting Jira issues: Toggle to enable/disable (disabled by default). When enabled and when a conflict is detected, conflicting Jira issues are linked together.

  • Link name: Select from the list of available link names.

We recommend creating a new link named “Conflict”, to be used specifically for the scheduling. A new link type can be added from Jira Settings > Issues > Issue linking.

• Auto-approval: Toggle to enable/disable (disabled by default). When enabled and the request is in the Conflict trigger status, it will be transitioned to the Approved (if no conflict is detected) or Rejected status (if one or more conflicts are detected).

  • Approved status: Choose from the list of statuses present in the issue workflow.

  • Rejected status: Choose from the list of statuses present in the issue workflow or select don’t change if you want the request to remain in the Trigger status when a conflict is detected.

• Allow exclusive booking: Toggle to enable/disable (disabled by default).

  • Exclusive option field: Select from the fields present in the issue creation screen. Only the Single Select List or Dropdown fields having a Yes option are supported.

The Allow exclusive booking option is not available for Blackout Event Type, as Blackout events are always exclusive.

• Auto-Book dependent environments: Toggle to enable/disable (disabled by default). When enabled, environments added as dependencies are added to the Dependent Environment field.

  • Dependent environments field: Select from the list of all Golive Environment Fields.

    • Check conflicts on dependencies: Toggle to enable/disable (enabled by default). When enabled, dependent environments are taken into account for checking potential conflicts.

Conflict Policy

The Golive Conflict Policy is utilized for identifying conflicts between scheduled events, as outlined in the table below:

Issue Activity Panel

An Issue Activity Panel is located next to the Comments section of Jira issues. This panel serves as an audit log for all scheduling activities executed by Golive. It provides both ERROR and INFO messages to facilitate conflict checking and troubleshooting when necessary.

Important

There's a known bug in Jira causing the Scheduling panel to fail to open if you click on the Scheduling tab before the page has fully loaded. In such cases, simply reload the page in your browser and wait for it to fully load before attempting to access Scheduling.

To learn how to schedule activities depending on Environments in Golive, refer to the following resources: