IT automation strategies are evolving into event-driven automation. Simply said, event-driven automation is a further building block on the journey to end-to-end automation. The need is to connect intelligence/analytics and service requests for an environment to automated actions so that activities can take place in a single motion.
For example, a large Red Hat customer identified significant expenditures on virtual machine (VM) issue remediations. They took an event-driven approach that saved millions of dollars by automating frequently repeated issue resolution processes. This has freed their IT staff to focus on other more valuable work.
Where can we apply this type of event-to-action approach? There are many possibilities, but a few use cases include the following:
Automated remediation
Perhaps the solution to some type of issue is a series of steps. Can you connect the analytics or tickets which tell you there is an issue to an automated series of steps to resolve that issue? A solution like this can help move your IT staff from an “interrupt-driven” style of working to one where they have the ability to better focus on key priorities, interesting engineering challenges, and innovation activities instead of low-level, repetitive work. This could include automated remediation of tickets or proactive remediation of issues based on known system behavior patterns. It could also include responding to monitoring events (alerts), such as the need to add more capacity or scalability.
Automated provisioning
How often are you receiving tickets to provision a new VM, stand up a cloud container, or provision some other type of solution? Are you confident that in every case these are provisioned in line with your specification or does this process sometimes introduce drift? By receiving a request and kicking off an automation job, the solution is implemented the same way every time, according to your specs. Are you under pressure to provision quickly? Event-driven automation can help your team create development and test environments quickly to help speed up innovation.
IT resilience, risk mitigation, and stability
What if you are able to quickly address a common outage through event-driven automation? Or proactively watch for signs that lead up to this outage, preventing it from occurring? What if it is a security risk where you can take immediate action before your environments are adversely impacted? Reliability and resilience are often key concerns for IT leaders and event-driven solutions can help you get ahead of risks.
Ticket enrichment
A common issue with ticket management is that tickets do not provide enough information to provide effective RCA (root cause analysis). Event-driven automation patterns could be utilized to great effect in reaching out to relevant systems so that corresponding tickets can be updated with rich detail to provide better RCA.
