Dealing with SMA assets

Assets in a SMA-based automation solution for WAP provide global configurations and parameters that can be leveraged by runbooks. For example, it is very likely that any runbook being executed for VM cloud's operations may require VMM server connection info and credentials. In large environments having hundreds of runbooks, instead of defining VMM server connection information and credentials per runbook, these can be declared as assets and can be leveraged by all runbooks.

Declaring such variables at global level in asset also helps in handling changes at a later stage in a very smooth manner.

Assets in Windows Azure Pack automation include the following:

• Connections

• Credentials

• Variables

• Schedules

• Modules

Asset types and functionalities

The following are the types of assets and their functionalities:

• Connections: Connections include connectivity details and authorized credentials for common services used by runbooks. Examples include services such as SCVMM, Azure, or any...