Automating Device Lifecycle Management with Freestyle Orchestrator in Workspace ONE Intelligence

Introduction

Omnissa Intelligence is an aggregation and correlation service that pulls data from multiple sources and provides IT admins with unfettered visibility into their environment. With Intelligence, organizations can generate reports and view dashboards that provide insight into their environment and assist with mitigating issues, business decisions, and sharing information across other teams and departments.

Omnissa Intelligence also offers automation opportunities through Freestyle Orchestrator (formerly Intelligence Automations). Freestyle is a low code orchestration platform for automating complex business use cases by sequencing tasks based on a trigger. The automation engine within Intelligence eases the burden of device management by taking automatic action based on specific rules created by IT admins. These workflows can accelerate IT tasks and issue resolution and can even be extended to third-party services using REST API through out-of-box connectors, as well as custom connectors.

Let’s look at a couple of ways that Freestyle Orchestrator in Intelligence can automate device lifecycle management for organizations.

Cleaning up Stale Device Records

One arduous task often required of IT admins is the cleaning up of stale device records in their Workspace ONE UEM instance. Stale devices can skew data in reports and dashboards and take up licenses that could be used elsewhere. For instance, stale device records could hamper efforts to deploy a critical security patch by making it appear that more devices require the patch than is truly the case. Implementing a Freestyle workflow that routinely checks for stale records and takes action on those records can help keep your list of managed devices accurate.

This workflow uses data from Workspace ONE UEM and triggers actions in both Intelligence and UEM. First, the workflow is configured to run a weekly schedule. It checks device data, specifically Last Seen, from Workspace ONE UEM.

For devices that have a Last Seen date greater than 60 days, Intelligence will then check to see if the device has been tagged for deletion. If it has not already been tagged, Intelligence will tell Workspace ONE UEM to tag the device for deletion, and then Intelligence will send an email to the device user, notifying them that the device has been offline and is marked for deletion. If, however, the device has already been tagged for deletion, Intelligence will then check if the device’s Last Seen date is greater than 90 days. If it is, Intelligence can instruct UEM to delete the device from the inventory.

If we return to the initial condition in the workflow, which was checking the device’s Last Seen date, you’ll notice that Intelligence is also checking if the device’s Last Seen date in less than 14 days. If this condition is true, Intelligence will then check if the device’s Last Seen date is within the last week and if the device is marked for deletion in Workspace ONE UEM. If both conditions are true, Intelligence can instruct UEM to remove the deletion tag from the device.

This simple workflow within Freestyle Orchestrator in Workspace ONE Intelligence can automate the otherwise burdensome task of ensuring that stale device records are deleted from Workspace ONE UEM. This frees IT admins to perform other, more important tasks, like environment performance improvements, troubleshooting issues, and applying security safeguards and best practices to devices.

This example uses date ranges between a week and 90 days as triggers for certain actions in the workflow. When you create the workflow in your environment, you can use whatever date range works best for your organization.

Additionally, IT admins can use Intelligence to create scheduled reports detailing device deletions, as well as custom dashboards that monitor the number of devices seen within 30 days, 60 days, and 90 days. These will both help organizations see the benefits of the workflow, as well as preserve data on device deletions in case it needs to be referenced in the future.

Ordering a New Battery for Devices

Another excellent example of the power of Freestyle Orchestrator in Workspace ONE Intelligence is its ability to integrate with third-party services like ServiceNow. In this next example, the workflow will monitor the battery health of Dell and Zebra devices and open a ticket in ServiceNow when sub-optimal performance is detected.

This example workflow requires a configured Workflow Connector for your ServiceNow instance. This allows Freestyle Orchestrator to initiate tasks within ServiceNow, such as opening tickets or incidents. Although this example uses the out-of-box connector for ServiceNow, you can use almost any ITSM tool by leveraging Custom Connectors.

This simple, but powerful workflow monitors the Dell Battery Health, Zebra Battery Health, and Zebra Battery Charge Cycle Count metrics from Workspace ONE UEM. If either the Dell Battery Health falls below 80 or the Zebra Battery Health is below 80 and Zebra Battery Charge Cycle Count is greater than 300, the workflow will execute a series of tasks that will alert IT admins of a need to replace the battery on the device.

If either of those conditions are met, the workflow will open a ticket in ServiceNow that a battery replacement is required. You can even add device-specific details to the ticket, like device name and device ID, by using dynamic lookup values in the Short Description field and the Comments field.

After a ticket is generated in ServiceNow, the workflow is configured to trigger Intelligence to send an email to IT admins, helpdesk staff, or whoever you define in the task. This ensures that the appropriate person or team is notified of the issue.

This simple workflow can help IT admins proactively head off battery issues to minimize the impact to the end user. Without this workflow, IT admins might not even be aware of an issue until the end user calls into the helpdesk to report a problem with their device. At that point, the end user might be impacted by an outage and unable to work. By implementing a workflow like this one, the battery replacement can be ordered, shipped, and resolved before the end user knows there is even an issue.

It should be noted that this workflow uses an automatic trigger, which means that it will capture device battery health below 80 AFTER enabling the workflow. Devices that already have a battery health below 80 will not be detected. However, when enabling the workflow, you have the option to run the workflow once to catch any existing devices that have a battery health below 80.

Summary

As you can see from the above two examples, Freestyle Orchestrator in Workspace ONE Intelligence is a powerful automation platform that can increase the efficiency of device management and ease the burden of many repetitive tasks from IT admins. With its access to a wealth of data from across your entire Workspace ONE and Horizon environments, and its integration with third-party services, Freestyle Orchestrator can help organizations take their device management to a whole new level.

For more information on Workspace ONE Intelligence, check out the Getting Started with Workspace ONE Intelligence tutorial on Tech Zone.