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Runbook automation can speed up your incident management. Learn how you can implement runbook automation and reduce toil.
A Runbook is a predefined set of steps or procedures that is usually executed manually by a systems engineer. For instance: say you want to upgrade an application on production, and you have a defined set of steps that are documented. We call this a runbook. It contains procedures to begin, stop, supervise, and debug the system.
Recent research shows that 80% of the time spent by engineering teams is invested in triaging incidents. Over the past few years, shift to microservices has resulted in an exponential increase in code-base complexity. Managing and monitoring several microservice endpoints means a large number of checkpoints and alerts. As a result, we end up having too many incidents during outages and engineering teams get buried in operational work. To get a better handle on incidents, teams can use Automated and Executable Runbooks to set up auto-mitigation or remediation. These runbooks should be triggered by Events/Logs and create incidents for engineers only when necessary.Broadly speaking, Runbooks can be categorized as:
Azure Automation:
Azure Automation is Microsoft's cloud-hosted automation and configuration service that provides consistent management across your Azure and non-Azure environments. It consists of process automation, update management, and configuration features. Azure Automation provides complete control during deployment, operations, and decommissioning of workloads and resources. It uses PowerShell Runbook or Powershell Graphical/Workflows or Python Runbook. We can trigger these runbooks from Azure Alerts, Webhooks, Schedule, Logic Apps, Another Runbook or watcher tasks.
In this example, we have created one Powershell Runbook to restart the WebApps servers. We can schedule this Powershell runbook as per requirement also we can trigger it from Webhooks or by schedule.
Rundeck:
Rundeck is a web-accessible console for dispatching commands and scripts to your nodes. It can also be used for deployments, operations tasks and more. Rundeck lets you create jobs made from existing scripts, run commands on selected nodes or schedule jobs to run at a later time.In short, using Rundeck you can automate routine or ad hoc tasks by creating runbooks.
Rundeck Features:
Rundeck can integrate with tools in several manners.
Ansible:
Ansible is a very powerful open-source configuration management tool. Ansible uses 'Playbook' to deploy, manage and configure anything from a single-server to multi-server environments. Here Playbook is similar to runbooks where you can define a set of procedures.
Ansible Features:
Ansible Playbook written in YAML, declaratively defines your configuration. Let's see one example of a playbook here we are installing Nginx servers using Ansible.
Squadcast:
Squadcast Runbooks will allow you to up level up your Incident Management with the next generation Reliability Orchestration Engine based on Site Reliability Engineering (SRE). It is designed to host and execute runbooks automation in response to operational events or incidents. By using Squadcast runbooks you can remove the toil or repetitive tasks from your system. We have already seen how we can create runbook using Azure Automation lets see how easy we can create it using Squadcast.
Let's say your Squadcast dashboard is showing that your Web Apps servers are using a large amount of resources, and could be due to high CPU or high traffic. To mitigate this, we want to create an automation that checks if resource utilization on web apps server has been increased, and has crossed a certain threshold—say 65%. To do this, we would create a runbook in Squadcast, and schedule this runbook to run on incident tickets automatically.
Runbooks Support:
Currently, Squadcast Runbooks supports the below languages...
Here are some best practices for runbook:
A runbook is a collection of procedures for dealing with common issues. They can help your team deal with these situations more efficiently. Here are a few general steps to keep in mind while writing a runbook:
A runbook should include the following:
A Runbook is a predefined set of technical steps, procedures or documentation that is usually executed manually by a systems engineer. A runbook can also contain information related to application deployment, monitoring and maintenance. Whereas SOPs are descriptions of the steps required to complete specific activities or tasks. They can be used to ensure that industry rules and regulations are followed in an organization.
A runbook is a step-by-step procedure that helps ensure the technical aspects of an organization's systems continue to function smoothly. A playbook is more general—outlining an organization's approach to a task and the responsibilities of its workers. While both a runbook and a playbook include information on technical aspects, a playbook will likely go into greater detail about the cultural, compliance, or user experience aspects of a task.
With the right amount of automation and strategic process management, you can improve incident remediation instructions and ensure runbooks are updated in a timely manner. This ensures that when an incident occurs next, the documentation is updated and also is available to the right person at the right time.
Runbook automation can speed up your incident management. Learn how you can implement runbook automation and reduce toil.
A Runbook is a predefined set of steps or procedures that is usually executed manually by a systems engineer. For instance: say you want to upgrade an application on production, and you have a defined set of steps that are documented. We call this a runbook. It contains procedures to begin, stop, supervise, and debug the system.
Recent research shows that 80% of the time spent by engineering teams is invested in triaging incidents. Over the past few years, shift to microservices has resulted in an exponential increase in code-base complexity. Managing and monitoring several microservice endpoints means a large number of checkpoints and alerts. As a result, we end up having too many incidents during outages and engineering teams get buried in operational work. To get a better handle on incidents, teams can use Automated and Executable Runbooks to set up auto-mitigation or remediation. These runbooks should be triggered by Events/Logs and create incidents for engineers only when necessary.Broadly speaking, Runbooks can be categorized as:
Azure Automation:
Azure Automation is Microsoft's cloud-hosted automation and configuration service that provides consistent management across your Azure and non-Azure environments. It consists of process automation, update management, and configuration features. Azure Automation provides complete control during deployment, operations, and decommissioning of workloads and resources. It uses PowerShell Runbook or Powershell Graphical/Workflows or Python Runbook. We can trigger these runbooks from Azure Alerts, Webhooks, Schedule, Logic Apps, Another Runbook or watcher tasks.
In this example, we have created one Powershell Runbook to restart the WebApps servers. We can schedule this Powershell runbook as per requirement also we can trigger it from Webhooks or by schedule.
Rundeck:
Rundeck is a web-accessible console for dispatching commands and scripts to your nodes. It can also be used for deployments, operations tasks and more. Rundeck lets you create jobs made from existing scripts, run commands on selected nodes or schedule jobs to run at a later time.In short, using Rundeck you can automate routine or ad hoc tasks by creating runbooks.
Rundeck Features:
Rundeck can integrate with tools in several manners.
Ansible:
Ansible is a very powerful open-source configuration management tool. Ansible uses 'Playbook' to deploy, manage and configure anything from a single-server to multi-server environments. Here Playbook is similar to runbooks where you can define a set of procedures.
Ansible Features:
Ansible Playbook written in YAML, declaratively defines your configuration. Let's see one example of a playbook here we are installing Nginx servers using Ansible.
Squadcast:
Squadcast Runbooks will allow you to up level up your Incident Management with the next generation Reliability Orchestration Engine based on Site Reliability Engineering (SRE). It is designed to host and execute runbooks automation in response to operational events or incidents. By using Squadcast runbooks you can remove the toil or repetitive tasks from your system. We have already seen how we can create runbook using Azure Automation lets see how easy we can create it using Squadcast.
Let's say your Squadcast dashboard is showing that your Web Apps servers are using a large amount of resources, and could be due to high CPU or high traffic. To mitigate this, we want to create an automation that checks if resource utilization on web apps server has been increased, and has crossed a certain threshold—say 65%. To do this, we would create a runbook in Squadcast, and schedule this runbook to run on incident tickets automatically.
Runbooks Support:
Currently, Squadcast Runbooks supports the below languages...
Here are some best practices for runbook:
A runbook is a collection of procedures for dealing with common issues. They can help your team deal with these situations more efficiently. Here are a few general steps to keep in mind while writing a runbook:
A runbook should include the following:
A Runbook is a predefined set of technical steps, procedures or documentation that is usually executed manually by a systems engineer. A runbook can also contain information related to application deployment, monitoring and maintenance. Whereas SOPs are descriptions of the steps required to complete specific activities or tasks. They can be used to ensure that industry rules and regulations are followed in an organization.
A runbook is a step-by-step procedure that helps ensure the technical aspects of an organization's systems continue to function smoothly. A playbook is more general—outlining an organization's approach to a task and the responsibilities of its workers. While both a runbook and a playbook include information on technical aspects, a playbook will likely go into greater detail about the cultural, compliance, or user experience aspects of a task.
With the right amount of automation and strategic process management, you can improve incident remediation instructions and ensure runbooks are updated in a timely manner. This ensures that when an incident occurs next, the documentation is updated and also is available to the right person at the right time.