Approval and pre-provisioning workflows enable you to specify approvers for a service request, customize approval emails and configure automated deployment for approved requests. You can configure conditional workflow steps and use variables to access information captured during the request process.
Design considerations
When preparing approval and pre-provisioning workflows, consider the following:
- Do you require multi-stage approval?
- What needs to happen before a VM is deployed?
- Who or what controls whether a new service request is approved — one or more individuals, quota calculations, or some other factor?
- If you configure quota limits, will you automatically reject requests that exceed quota, or will you allow approvers to make this decision?
- Does anyone need to be notified, without requiring their approval?
- Once a request is approved, should automatic deployment commence, or will an administrator manually deploy the service?
Best practices
- Create an approval process that supports your business requirements — for example, to control costs, to control service deployments, or to justify service requests.
- For software development teams, as long as their request is within quota, allow for automatic request approval. This allows IT to quickly meet the needs of the business.
- For service providers, consider how your services are sold. If sold as blocks of resources, you will use quota and notify sales teams. If sold as on-demand, all-you-can-eat, automatically approve requests to be billed at a later date.
Examples
With approval and pre-provisioning workflows, you can:
- Set up a two-stage approval process: line of business approval, followed by IT approval.
- Add a second level of approval for requests that will exceed quota. For example:
- One of your customers has configured a daily cost quota for each of their 20 organizations. If a service request is within the organization's daily cost quota, the Approval and Pre-Provisioning workflow sends an approval email to the organization manager. Service requests that will exceed that quota display a warning, notifying the requester that the request may not be approved. The request is then automatically rejected, and a notification email is sent to the requester.
- Another customer sends an approval email to one email address if the request will exceed an organization's CPU quota, and to a different email address if the request will exceed the organization's storage quota.
