Automated runbooks provide a lot of value for enterprises in managing IT operations, but as with any plan, a runbook is only as good as its content. Typically, runbooks outline the steps of a complex IT operation process for more streamlined management. Runbooks are often used for IT disaster recovery, cloud migration, and application releases.
This article overviews the importance of updating runbooks, the associated challenges and risks of ongoing maintenance, best practices, runbook automation examples, and benefits of IT disaster recovery automation.
The importance of keeping automated runbooks up to date
Executing a plan, or runbook, that is outdated brings huge risk. It’s critical to maintain a runbook and ensure that automated runbooks for IT operations are up to date with all relevant tasks, dependencies, integrations to current technology tools, and accurate application data.
Risks associated with outdated runbooks
There are serious risks associated with outdated runbooks. It is crucial to maintain a runbook and ensure it is regularly reviewed and updated. For example, an IT disaster recovery runbook that isn’t kept up to date could have detrimental impacts should a disaster event occur, and enterprises are concerned.
Our recent IT disaster and cyber recovery survey cites enterprises’ concerns about the many potential risks of outdated IT DR procedures. One of the biggest risks to an organization is relying on an outdated runbook, which can lead to ineffective response strategies, increased downtime, and compliance issues. Other major risks include:
- Increased vulnerability to cyber attacks
- Ongoing and intensifying problems due to continued failures
- Unnecessary pressure and stress for the IT team
- Compliance issues leading to regulatory penalties
- Reputational damage
- Loss of revenue due to customer churn
As you can see, risks stretch beyond just the procedure - encompassing business, financial and customer impacts.
How to maintain automated runbooks effectively
There are various ways to ensure your automated runbooks are well maintained and can be executed effectively. Let’s review how to maintain a runbook.
Regular runbook reviews and tests (for live recovery readiness)
There’s nothing worse than creating a comprehensive procedure document or runbook and then using it in perpetuity without any reviews. Your IT operations runbooks, particularly for recovery, should be tested for various scenarios (that mimic real-life events), and updated accordingly, at least annually. Regularly testing and updating runbooks ensures that your processes are sound and will actually work in a live recovery.
For example, testing and updating an IT disaster recovery runbook helps ensure:
- Dependencies are in order
- Teams (Network, Platform, Database, etc.) are assigned to the correct tasks and workstreams
- Validation tasks are included
- Underlying integrations are working as expected
- Communication channels are ready for milestone notifications
Incorporating feedback from end users and stakeholders
When executing a runbook for a large-scale IT recovery incident, like a data center outage, it’s important to include input and feedback from all relevant parties. Each group provides essential feedback and a different perspective to help ensure that no viewpoint is missed. This will ensure that the runbook is updated with any necessary revisions based on lessons learned from the incident.
For example, executives and management will want to ensure they get accurate reporting during and after the event. End users, on the other hand, will provide insights on the procedure itself, task-level details, communication hiccups, opportunities for automation, and any other issues. Each group brings valuable feedback that should then be reviewed and incorporated into the next version of the runbook.
Setting up a routine to check for outdated information
In addition to incorporating lessons learned and feedback, it’s important to check that the procedure itself, including tasks and relevant data, is accurate.
For an IT disaster recovery runbook, it’s important that your list of applications is still accurate. Have any applications been decommissioned? Are there new applications and what criticality are they? (mission-critical, business critical, important, etc.) Are your application runbook templates still up-to-date?
During your post-mortem event (or test) review, include an agenda item to check for outdated information. By including it each time, it makes it part of the process.
Best practices for updating automated runbooks
The process of updating or maintaining a runbook doesn’t have to be overwhelming. Here are a few best practices for updating automated runbooks.
Automated tools
While many IT operations will have some level of manual tasks, automation can increase efficiency by reducing potential errors when completing low-value, repetitive tasks. Automated runbook platforms provide an effective way to create, execute and update runbooks that include both automated and manual tasks. Many automated runbook platforms, like Cutover, provide out-of-the-box features that make it easier.
Version control
Understanding and managing your automated runbook versions can save hours and avoid headaches during a live recovery. Cutover’s automated runbook platform includes template version functionality that automatically makes a previous version invalid. The previous version is set to read-only mode and is available to reference, but the new version is the only one that is editable and available. Version control functionality makes it easier to prevent confusion or misuse of outdated runbook versions.
Integrate application data
Regardless if it’s an IT disaster recovery, cloud migration, or software release - runbooks need accurate application data to be effective. This includes both design data from the application’s source of truth, typically the configuration management database (CMDB). Run time data (storage space size, amount of nodes in a cluster, etc.) is also important and is typically held in application performance monitoring (APM) tools. Ideally, application data should continually sync from the CMDB and APM tools to the runbook - ensuring precision and application-specific runbooks.
Continuous improvement
Similar to incorporating feedback from stakeholders and end users, it’s important to outline lessons learned and update the runbook accordingly. Maintaining a runbook ensures that documented processes remain relevant and effective. After a runbook is executed, hold a post-mortem meeting to debrief on what happened, highlight successes, and outline what areas need improvement. In reality, a runbook will likely not be a static document. It should be a living document that is adjusted based on changes in IT systems, processes and staffing.
Communicating changes when updating runbooks
Communication of runbook changes is essential to avoid confusion and ensure everyone is working from the most updated version. As part of an approval process, automated runbooks often have built-in notifications to help communicate changes to end users and stakeholders.
Automating the runbook update process for consistency and efficiency
Leveraging automation when updating runbooks saves time, reduces potential manual errors, and increases efficiency and productivity.
Approval workflows
Automated runbooks will often include approval workflow capabilities, which help ensure that any runbook changes follow the appropriate protocols and are communicated properly.
For example, the automated runbook for IT disaster recovery requires an update to the go-no-go (GnG) validation task in the failover workstream. By using an approval workflow, the disaster recovery or resilience manager can add the validation task and kick-start the approval workflow. Depending on how complex the process is, you may need a multi-step approval workflow. Regardless, automating, tracking and auditing approvals can be very valuable.
Common challenges in maintaining updated automated runbooks
We’ve reviewed the importance of maintaining a runbook and the best practices to do so, but there are also challenges to consider, especially when managing runbooks at scale. Often, the configuration of an application changes over time without proper tracking or documentation - this is referred to as configuration drift. This has a direct impact on the reliability of a recovery plan or runbook, making it difficult to keep the order of tasks accurate during a recovery.
Let’s look at an example scenario of runbooks at scale:
An enterprise has 1,000 applications requiring 1,000 disaster recovery plan runbooks. If it takes an average of two hours to review an individual plan, that equates to 2,000 hours a year or 250 working days (eight hours/day) just for runbook reviews. That doesn’t account for testing or executing the runbooks during an actual disaster event or outage.
This is extremely time consuming, a huge strain on IT staff resources, and at risk for potential manual errors.
Simplify automated runbook maintenance with the Cutover platform
Cutover’s runbook automation software makes it easier for you to automate manual tasks with integrations across your tech stack for true orchestration and accelerated IT operations processes. Accelerate and improve the accuracy of runbook creation and maintenance with the Cutover Application Metastore. Aggregate and access up-to-date design and run time application data including CMDB data, to automate the creation of IT operations runbooks.
Learn more about how Cutover’s automated runbooks and Application Metastore can help you maintain accurate runbooks with efficiency and ease. Book a demo of Cutover today.