Timeout of ADO pipeline whilst waiting for manual change request approval

[Rob96]

We are testing the use of DevOps Change acceleration with Azure DevOps. We have integration working and are currently testing manual creation of a change request by the pipeline. This is working for us and the pipeline is updated if the change request is approved within 59 mins but if it is not actioned within this time the pipeline stage times out and the stage fails.

We have the ServiceNow authored ServiceNow DevOps plugin with ADO. Our ADO people think the Microsoft plugin ServiceNow Change Management is needed also. The instructions for the Microsoft plugin certainly describe that it holds the pipeline without timeout, but it seems the ServiceNow plugin must be capable of working this solution too.

I wonder if the way the create change request task is added to the ADO pipeline affects this. Has anyone had this issue and resolved it? If so what do you recommend?

[Mike Lampert1]

Firstly, you don't need the MS ServiceNow Change Management extension as well as the MS ServiceNow DevOps extension in order to get change creation triggered from the ADO pipeline and have the pipeline pause to wait for change approval.

In relation to the pipeline timeout value, there are two places to check. Firstly, in ADO itself there is a 60 minute default timeout value, but you can override this with your own value on the job step. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/pipelines/process/phases?view=azure-devops&tabs=yaml 

Secondly, within ServiceNow DevOps Change Velocity, there is a property [sn_devops.change_request_callback_timeout] which sets the timeout value in minutes until which the system will try to process a change when an inbound event goes into the waiting state during a pipeline run. https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/washingtondc-devops/page/product/enterprise-dev-ops/concept/dev-o... 

Hope that helps...

[Rob96]

Thanks Mike, that's really helpful. 

One thing I'd like to check: the DevOps Change Velocity properties link show the timeout is 120 by default. On our instance we don't see that property. Is that available only with the latest version?

[Mike Lampert1]

Hi Rob, from DevOps Change Workspace, go to Administration > System Configuration > Properties to view/edit all the properties. If you don't see this in your workspace, then you'll need to upgrade to the lastest version 4.0.0