The IT landscape is often characterized by a whirlwind of activity, with disparate teams handling various aspects of infrastructure, applications, and data. This fragmented approach can lead to chaos, where teams operate in isolation, unaware of the impact their actions have on others.
Innovative organizations overcome these silos with automated runbook strategies that bridge the gaps between teams and automation. This involves breaking down silos between teams, establishing clear communication channels, and implementing automation functions that span the entire IT ecosystem.
In this blog post we will show that, by centralizing runbook automation efforts and fostering a collaborative environment, organizations can streamline workflows, reduce errors, and improve overall IT performance.
What is runbook automation?
Runbook automation contains a set of tasks and their dependencies that need to be undertaken to complete a technology operation. Those tasks can be manual activities carried out by an individual or team, or they can trigger automated activities like executing a script. In this way, runbooks bring together human expertise and knowledge and the benefits of automation.
There are a few key benefits to this approach, including the following.
Standardize repetitive processes:
Automated runbooks enable you to standardize and codify tasks and procedures for processes such as IT disaster recovery (IT DR) or cloud migrations. They ensure that everyone involved has the tools, expertise, and information needed to complete their role without having to be on multiple calls or hunt through spreadsheets.
Optimize existing resources:
Runbook automation enables internal teams to access information more quickly and complete complex tasks more efficiently. This dramatically shortens the time-to-value for major strategic initiatives like cloud migrations and application releases while freeing teams to focus additional time and energy on other high-value priorities.
Reduce risk:
Runbook automation ensures standard procedures are in place for when organizations need to react quickly to an outage or cyber threat. Additionally, it reduces the risk of human error during a recovery or implementation, and runbook platforms with post-event review features help regulated organizations provide better audit information.
Key components of runbook automation
Runbook automation components ought to be simple to navigate and understand. Generally, they include:
- Task name and description: Each task should have a clear and concise name or title that describes the action to be taken and/or its intended purpose. A brief description can also be included to provide further context.
- Task dependencies: Outline any dependencies, prerequisites or conditions that must be met before the task can be executed - for example, if another task has to be completed before this one can be started. With automated runbooks, you can set up your runbook so that a task cannot be started unless certain requirements have been met.
- Task completion confirmation: Automated runbook technology should include an audit trail that automatically records when a task was completed and by whom, removing the need for manual post-event review.
- Version history: Keep track of different versions of the runbook and document any changes or updates made over time. This is particularly important in ensuring that the runbook remains up-to-date with changing systems or processes.
- Runbook automation linking: It can be useful in some cases to create a structure of parent and child automated runbooks. For example, a parent runbook may be used to manage an IT disaster recovery as a whole and link to child runbooks for recovering each service.
It’s also common practice to include a task ID, identify a task owner, and include all stakeholders who will be involved in the runbook’s operations.
Runbook automation examples
In most cases runbook automation is used for large scale and complex IT processes. Here are some runbook examples.
Cyber and IT disaster recovery
Cyber and IT disaster recovery is a critical process for organizations, ensuring business continuity in the face of unplanned technology disruptions. Runbook automation can play a pivotal role in enhancing the effectiveness of recovery efforts such as:
- Automated recovery plan execution: Runbooks can automate the execution of cyber and IT DR plans, triggering failover procedures, engaging the correct teams, and restoring systems and data in a timely manner.
- Human-in-the-loop decision making: While automation can handle routine tasks, people's judgment is crucial for complex decisions during a recovery. Runbook automation should facilitate communication and collaboration between security analysts, business owners, and other stakeholders enabling them to share insights and expertise to effectively analyze and respond to a cyber attack or an IT outage.
- Real-time visibility and monitoring: Runbook automation can provide comprehensive, real-time visibility into the recovery process, enabling the monitoring of system status, automation progress, resource utilization, and performance metrics.
- Ensure governance and regulatory compliance: Runbook automation enables you to meet regulatory requirements with an audit trail that automatically logs the timings of who did what and when.
Application migration to the cloud:
Cloud migration projects are often complex and time consuming but runbook automation platform can streamline the process through:
- Automated infrastructure provisioning: runbook automation that orchestrates the provisioning of cloud infrastructure resources, such as virtual machines, storage, and networking components.
- People’s oversight and guidance: Runbook automation that facilitates communication between cloud architects, engineers, and business stakeholders, ensuring alignment and informed decisions throughout the migration process.
- End-to-end visibility: Runbook automation can provide migration teams with complete transparency during the entire migration program with real-time visibility into upstream and downstream dependencies, enabling full compliance, resource optimization, and the ability to quickly identify potential bottlenecks.
- Optimization with automation: Reduce error-prone manual recovery tasks with automated runbooks and tasks, and integrations to commonly used apps.
Choosing the right runbook automation tool
In this article we have covered a number of areas for runbook automation such as ket benefits, use cases and components/functionality. But what should you look for when choosing the right runbook automation tool? Well here are some considerations:
Automatic orchestration
Without runbook automation, there is a heavy reliance on individuals to manually orchestrate the teams and tasks involved in a particular operation. This can involve manually updating spreadsheets, spending hours on bridge calls, and contacting individuals by phone or email to let them know when to start their tasks. With automated runbooks, this manual effort is removed. Automated runbooks orchestrate this complex sequence of tasks, ensuring that teams and technology follow the set path in the correct order by automatically notifying people when to start their tasks and triggering automated processes. When orchestration is automated in the runbook, there is no need for a person to manually sequence the tasks or spend time letting teams know when they need to take actions.
Enterprise visibility and reporting
With automated runbooks, the progress and status of activities are automatically reported in real time and freely available for stakeholders and teams to self-serve, so they don’t have to wait to be given progress updates. This also applies to the real-time progress of multiple runbooks at the same time, providing a comprehensive overview of all your in-progress activities.
Dynamic execution
Runbook automation can be dynamically adjusted during execution by API or users that have the correct permissions, allowing for the process to adapt as needed on the basis of new information or requirements. This is particularly useful during events such as cyber recovery where you may be getting new information about the extent of the outage after the recovery has begun.
Integrations and an API
Automated runbooks have powerful integrations to third-party platforms that create a single source of execution. This increases flexibility and productivity and reduces the risk of human error. Likewise, an automated runbook will have a well-defined API that allows you to create or query runbooks, tasks, or teams directly from third-party platforms.
Post-execution analytics and regulatory audit logs
Automated runbooks automatically record the timing and execution of tasks for reporting and generating an audit trail that is not editable. This serves as a record of performance for auditing, continuous improvement, and regulatory compliance purposes.
Scalability
The number of tasks, users, dependencies, parallel tasks, and runbooks being executed at the same time runs into the thousands to deliver enterprise-grade capability. This enterprise-grade capability has been proven in some of the world’s largest and most sophisticated organizations.
Implementing runbook automation
IT operations use runbook automation software or tools in order to speed up tasks and avoid costly mistakes. We strongly recommend following these 5 steps to create high-quality automated runbooks that deliver the business value and technical guidance you need:
1. Before creating a runbook, assess your processes
Before creating a runbook it is important to take the time to assess each of your individual processes to understand where a runbook tool or software will be most helpful. Highly complicated and/or technical tasks, routine procedures, and job functions with high error rates are all great candidates for runbook creation.
2. Gather the necessary information to add to your runbook
When assembling the information you need in your runbook, it’s best to assign highly experienced team members to undertake each specific task and record each of their steps in detail. As part of this process, they should include all necessary runbook documentation, login credentials, software programs, and other necessary components needed to complete each individual step of the runbook process. They should be as detailed as possible, even if many of those details don’t make it into the finalized runbook.
3. Write each step in a detailed fashion to create your runbook
The runbook should record the necessary information in a step-by-step formatted guide that takes into account the dependencies between tasks to ensure that the plan flows correctly.
The key to this phase of runbook creation is simplicity and clarity. Runbooks should be highly intuitive and easy for team members to use. An overly complicated runbook that requires additional support defeats the purpose, so do your best to avoid unnecessarily complicated language.
4. Automate and integrate your runbook
Optimize your runbooks by automating manual steps through runbook integrations with your existing technology stack. For example, link your runbooks with your existing communications tools such as Slack or Microsoft Teams to automate comms through those channels, or link your runbooks up with your ITSM platform so that your systems or record and execution are synced. Remember that an automated runbook will help teams save precious time!
5. Improve runbooks periodically
Your runbooks are living organisms that should be routinely reassessed and updated as needs and procedures change. As teams complete their assigned runbook tasks, encourage them to make and share improvements to update guidance for future use. You might also consider identifying any manual steps within your runbooks that could be automated with the implementation of APIs and specialized runbook automation tools.
The future of runbook automation
The future of runbook automation is evolving at a rapid pace due to new generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) models. While still in its infancy there are a few areas where GenAI is available today in runbook automation tools. For example:
- AI-enabled runbook summaries
Cutover’s AI takes structured runbook data and generates a brief summary of the runbook’s purpose and what it contains, enabling users to understand the goal of a runbook at a glance.
- AI-enabled runbook creation
Build runbooks in minutes, not hours with Cutover AI. Generate new runbooks with tasks, dependencies and descriptions from third-party and unstructured data sources and then customize the new runbook by refining it with specific tasks.
- AI-enabled runbook improvements
Cutover AI will evaluate runbook effectiveness and suggest intelligent improvements to help you uncover potential bottlenecks or inefficiencies during migrations, recoveries or releases.
Create automated runbooks with Cutover
The implementation of new technologies can be challenging, but Cutover’s Collaborative Automation platform with dynamic automated runbooks can simplify the creation of the runbook process by combining:
- Automated configuration and deployment: Cutover orchestrates the sequence of tasks during a platform implementation and reduces the risk of human error caused by static plans.
- People’s expertise for integration and customization: Cutover facilitates communication between technology experts and business users, ensuring that new technologies are integrated effectively and meet specific business needs.
- Visibility for stakeholders: Cutover provides comprehensive visibility of your critical tasks and workflows. Cutover also provides a single pane of class with real-time visibility to monitor the status of your technology implementation. Dashboards are easily shared with senior and external team members who need to view progress.
See how Cutover’s automated runbooks work in this short video
To find out more about how automated runbooks could benefit your organization, get in touch with us at info@cutover.com or request a demo.