Targeting an Orchestration Job to an Environment or Plan - am I missing something?

[jimbobmcgee]

I have been evaluating Otter recently, but am coming up against a problem. To simplify it to its basic level, I don't think assigned Roles are being correctly determined when running Plans, which is having a knock-on effect on determining which Server is in scope when using Plans that target a Role or Envrionment.

In my evaluation environment, I have a Role, DatabaseServer, and a small Environment hierarchy which represents an application:

• App
  • App Live
  • App SIT
  • App UAT

So far, I have defined a Server Server001, and assigned it to the App SIT environment and DatabaseServer role.

I build an Orchestration Plan -- which, to simplify the problem, just logs various variables:

Log-Information Current = $ToJson(%(Server: $ServerName,
                                    Environment: $EnvironmentName,
                                    Role: $RoleName,
                                    IsSimulation: $IsSimulation));

Log-Information ServersIn = $ToJson(%(Env: @ServersInEnvironment(), 
                                      Role: @ServersInRole(), 
                                      RoleAndEnv: @ServersInRoleAndEnvironment()));

Log-Information All = $ToJson(%(Envs: @AllEnvironments(), 
                                Roles: @AllRoles(), 
                                Servers: @AllServers()));

From here, I use the tie(?) icon to create a number of jobs, each targeting in different ways:

1. If I target Server001 specifically, the result seems to show the server and environment correctly, but not the role:

   Skipping collection run; execute only.
   Collection run succeeded.
   Beginning execution run...
   Current = {"ServerName":"Server001","Environment":"App SIT","Role":"","IsSimulation":"true"}
   ServersIn = {"Env":["Server001"],"Role":[],"RoleAndEnv":[]}
   All = {"Envs":["App","App Live","App SIT","App UAT"],"Roles":["DatabaseServer"],"Servers":["LOCALHOST","Server001"]}
   Cleaning up temporary files on Inedo Agent (v??, Server001:46336)...
   Execution run complete.
   Execution run succeeded.
   

2. If I target the DatabaseServer role specifically, I don't get any matched server, environment or role:

   Skipping collection run; execute only.
   Collection run succeeded.
   Beginning execution run...
   Current = {"Server":"","Environment":"","Role":"","IsSimulation":"true"}
   ServersIn = {"Env":[],"Role":[],"RoleAndEnv":[]}
   All = {"Envs":["App","App Live","App SIT","App UAT"],"Roles":["DatabaseServer"],"Servers":["LOCALHOST","Server001"]}
   Execution run complete.
   Execution run succeeded.
   

3. If I target the App SIT environment, the result shows the environment, but empty server and role values:

   Skipping collection run; execute only.
   Collection run succeeded.
   Beginning execution run...
   Current = {"Server":"","Environment":"App SIT","Role":"","IsSimulation":"true"}
   ServersIn = {"Env":[],"Role":[],"RoleAndEnv":[]}
   All = {"Envs":["App","App Live","App SIT","App UAT"],"Roles":["DatabaseServer"],"Servers":["LOCALHOST","Server001"]}
   Execution run complete.
   Execution run succeeded.
   

4. If I target both the App SIT environment and the DatabaseServer role (by filling in both fields), I get the same as in #3.

I believe this is causing my overall problem, where Jobs that apply Plans targeting Servers are successful, but those that target Roles and/or Environments are failing with This operation requires a valid server context. Use a "for server ..." block to set the server context., but I don't know how to resolve this. I thought I might have to use a Loop block to iterate over @ServersInRoleAndEnvironment, but this list variable appears to be empty in all the above cases, so I'm not sure where to go here.

This seems (to me) like a fundamental thing that Otter should do for me, so I must be missing something obvious, but I just can't seem to reason about it.

Product: Otter
Version: 2.0.12

[jrasch]

Hi Jim,

Apologies for the lack of response here, but I wanted to let you know that we had quite a bit of back-and-forth internally on this post and implemented nearly all of your expectations:

1. you are absolutely correct about the variable context not behaving as expected, and
2. the biggest problem was that the behavior of certain variables (particularly $RoleName) was undefined
3. we've updated the docs to reflect the "new" behavior in the latest version (v2.1.0 at the time of this post): https://inedo.com/support/documentation/otter/core-concepts/jobs#orchestration-job-context
4. we release v2.1.0 last night with these changes included

Thank you again for the detailed report and reproduction steps.