System Center 2012 Orchestrator — Lesson 1: Orchestrator Architecture, Runbooks, and Automation Planning

Learning Objectives

• Explain Orchestrator components, management servers, runbook servers, databases, and consoles
• Identify repeatable operational processes, triggers, dependencies, credentials, and success criteria
• Design runbooks with clear inputs, outputs, branching, logging, and error behavior

Detailed Topics

• Explain Orchestrator components: Explain Orchestrator components, management servers, runbook servers, databases, and consoles
• Identify repeatable operational processes: Identify repeatable operational processes, triggers, dependencies, credentials, and success criteria
• Design runbooks with clear inputs: Design runbooks with clear inputs, outputs, branching, logging, and error behavior

Guided Demonstration

1. Review the requirement, environment, dependencies, roles, risks, and expected outcome.
2. Demonstrate the relevant configuration, analysis, code, or administration workflow step by step.
3. Capture settings, outputs, logs, screenshots, calculations, or test evidence.
4. Compare the observed result with the stated acceptance criteria.

Hands-On Activity

Map a manual IT process into a controlled Orchestrator runbook design.

• Document assumptions and the planned sequence before making changes.
• Complete the activity and preserve evidence of normal and exception behavior.
• Record issues, corrective actions, and reusable operational or development notes.

Troubleshooting Focus

• Separate symptoms from causes and collect evidence before applying a fix.
• Check configuration, permissions, data, dependencies, capacity, connectivity, and recent changes.
• Validate rollback, recovery, support ownership, and user or business impact.

Validation Checklist

• The requirement and expected outcome are clear.
• The selected configuration, design, query, code, or process is documented.
• Normal, boundary, failure, security, and operational conditions are reviewed.
• The result is supported by evidence and the next improvement is prioritized.

Lesson Outcome

Learners can explain and apply Orchestrator Architecture, Runbooks, and Automation Planning in a realistic scenario and validate the result with documented evidence.