Companies are on a journey to use automation more strategically across their organizations, and automating IT services is an important step in that direction. Discover Financial Services is an example of an automation plan in action, with an “Extreme Automation” strategy that underpins automation in everything they do. Other businesses are exploring similar techniques.
Red Hat’s goal is to integrate automation everywhere, and the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform enables you to automate the operations that are important to you. Its architecture makes teams more unified, enhances communication, and speeds up the completion of complex operations like application deployment.
Event-driven automation is replacing traditional IT automation methodologies. Simply said, event-driven automation is another step on the road to end-to-end automation. The requirement is to link intelligence/analytics and service requests for an environment to automated actions so that tasks can be performed in a single motion. Another large customer, for example, found high spending on virtual machine (VM) issue resolution. They used an event-driven strategy, which resulted in millions of dollars saved by automating often recurring issue resolution processes. This has allowed their IT personnel to focus on more important tasks.
The question then becomes, where can we implement this event-to-action strategy? There are numerous alternatives, however, the following are a few examples.
Perhaps the solution to a problem is a step-by-step process. Can you link the analytics or tickets that indicate an issue to an automated series of procedures to address it? A system like this can assist your IT employees in transitioning from an “interrupt-driven” work style to one that allows them to focus on significant goals, exciting technical challenges, and innovation activities rather than low-level, repetitive tasks. This could involve automatic ticket remediation or proactive issue remediation based on established system behavior patterns. Responding to monitoring events (alerts), such as the need to add extra capacity or scalability, could also be included.
How usually do you get tickets to provide a new VM, a cloud container, or another form of a solution? Are you satisfied that these are provisioned by your specifications in every case, or does this process occasionally introduce drift? Receiving a request and initiating an automated job ensures that the solution is implemented consistently and according to your specifications. Are you under time constraints to provision? Event-driven automation can let your team quickly construct development and testing environments, which can assist accelerate innovation.
What if you could quickly resolve a common outage using event-driven automation? Or should you keep an eye out for warning indicators that this outage is about to happen and prevent it from happening? What if it’s a security risk for which you can take rapid action before your environments are harmed? Reliability and resilience are frequently top priorities for IT professionals, and event-driven solutions can help you stay ahead of risks.
One typical problem with ticket management is that tickets do not contain enough information to give effective RCA (root cause analysis). Event-driven automation patterns could be used effectively to reach out to relevant systems and update corresponding tickets with rich detail to give improved RCA.
Now that we’ve discussed various use cases and benefits, let’s look at the technology required to make it all work. At the most basic level, we will require rules (i.e. some type of decision-making capabilities) as well as a workflow execution tool.
The rules will search for circumstances in which certain requirements are met and then launch an Ansible Playbook to address the “event” for which the decision system has determined a required action.
Monitoring tools, for example, may detect VM faults that indicate an application or IT problem. This “event” provides specific information, such as machine data. A rule in the decision engine may translate the type of event produced by the monitoring tools to behavior or workflow.
In our example, we’ll use the VMware version number, the VM IP address, and the server IP address to launch an Ansible Playbook that will perform health check validations on that VM. Assume the health check reveals that something is not right. This data is then utilized in a second validation step to correct the problem. Another process component that validates that the remediation is complete and proper before automatically updating the ticket to “resolved” is possible.
As you transition from human to system-driven operations, Ansible Automation Platform integrates the automation into your environment’s wide ecosystem of management tooling. Ansible Automation Platform can complete work automatically when your management tools and decision-making applications tell it what needs to be done.
An event bus, a rules engine, an automation workflow tool, a rules database, and services to execute the plan determined by the rules engine are all required components for this type of architecture. This type of architecture may employ technologies such as Kafka or Red Hat AMQ for streaming, event buses, and other solutions that adhere to open event formatting standards, such as cloudevents.io, an event-driven ecosystem standard.
Automation is elevated and more meaningful to your company when combined with decision systems, rules, and workflow support. You have the means to reform IT to focus on innovation and significant engineering issues, rather than hundreds or thousands of low-level chores that must be done but distract from essential goals. Consider the value you can bring from IT when you can automate boring but important tasks.
Finally, by coordinating your automation using the Ansible Automation Platform and implementing an event-driven automation solution, you can improve the observability of all your systems, obtaining total insight into what is happening and changing at any time.
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