Managing Actors in Automation Builder

Actors within Automations

An actor is a user that executes an automatic task in a job. By default, the actor that executes an automatic task is the Itential user, but any user in IAP can be an actor. When building an automation, a Designer can specify for each automatic task which user should be designated as the actor. The user can be one of the following:

• Itential - The machine user.
• Job Initiator - The user that started the job.
• Any Prior Manual Task - The user of a manual task that occurs previous to the currently configured automatic task within the automation.

When the task runs, it calls the method, writes to the Audit Trail, and is authorized in the same manner as if that user had called the method associated with the task via the Northbound API. If the task invokes an external system API, IAP uses the actor's credentials in the external system API call, which leverages defined access control mechanisms that might be defined on the external system. If an actor is selected from a manual task that is on a branch that does not run, then the Automation Engine will fallback to the IAP user.

Managing Actors

Actors are managed in Automation Builder. A Designer can select from either the default IAP user, the Job initiator, or a user from any prior manual task. A common use-case for actors is to associate a network change with the user that approved (worked) a Dry Run Review task.

In the following automation, an actor will be added to the Automatic Success task.

Figure 1: Actor Added to Automatic Task

When editing the Automatic Success task, or any other automatic task in IAP, you now have the option to select the actor. The Actor field displays the following options in the task dialog dropdown:

• Itential (Pronghorn) user (default).
• Job initiator (always available).
• Branch Task (only option available to the Automation Designer).

Figure 2: Select Actor

Assigning an Actor to a Task

All actors will be set/run as the Itential user by default. In order to assign an actor to a task other than the Itential user, the Automation Builder will need to edit the desired automations to benefit from this feature.