As digital services become more critical to business operations, uptime is paramount. Digital incidents are inevitable, but a rapid response is a key business differentiator. Many ITOps and DevOps teams still rely on manual, reactive processes. This equates to slow, increased Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR), and is unsustainable and error-prone.
The modern solution is runbook automation, which helps you improve incident response and keep your services on.
What is a runbook? And why automate it?
A runbook is a detailed guide of standardized procedures for IT operations tasks to resolve known issues. Sharing knowledge across teams becomes easier, and expert escalations are reduced.
The case for automation
Traditional runbooks are often manual. Automating them into executable workflows helps save time spent on manual labor, which is vital when dealing with incident resolution.
An automated runbook standardizes incident response by capturing expert methods and allowing them to be delegated and executed by anyone, including AI agents. This is key to achieving faster resolution and reducing the risk of human error.
How PagerDuty Runbook Automation works
PagerDuty makes the process of creating and running automated workflows easy, fast, and secure by:
- Authoring and execution: Automation authors can create workflows using a low-code/no-code GUI. They’re also able to prompt AI for assistance. These automated jobs can be delegated to end-users via UI plugins in tools they already use, like Jira or ServiceNow. Jobs can be run on-demand, triggered by events, or scheduled for routine execution depending on your organization’s needs.
- Core part of the PagerDuty Operations Cloud: Automation is a core capability of the PagerDuty Operations Cloud. Both users and event triggers from PagerDuty AIOps can initiate automated workflows for diagnosis and remediation. For example, the Rundeck integration can automatically kick off jobs in response to incidents to gather diagnostic data or implement fixes.
- Flexible deployment: PagerDuty offers both SaaS and self-hosted options for runbook automation. The self-hosted option offers maximum flexibility for custom security configurations and integrations with on-premise systems.
A practical path to automation: The “crawl, walk, run” approach
Adopting automation is a journey. The “crawl, walk, run” approach allows your company to develop automation capabilities successfully by building confidence and demonstrating value at each phase.
Crawl: Simple, single-step actions
- What to automate: Focus on simple, low-impact actions such as automated diagnostics to gather information. This can include running commands to check logs, pull service status, or perform performance checks.
- Benefit: Equips first responders with the information needed to manage an issue without escalating to specialists. This helps reduce alert fatigue.
Walk: Multi-step sequences
- What to automate: The next step in automation is to implement multi-step sequences for advanced diagnostics and the remediation of persistent or common issues. Restarting a service and then confirming its status is a common example.
- Benefit: Reduces the number of issues requiring escalation to other teams or specialists.
Run: Complex, proactive automation
- What to automate: Focus on automating intricate tasks that require elevated permissions on various systems. This will facilitate self-healing for routine issues with predictable patterns.
- Benefit: By acting on incidents before responders are notified, you can significantly reduce MTTR and costly downtime.
The future is automated and proactive
Automation aims to transform operations by shifting teams from reactive fire-fighting to proactive innovation. Automating incident response lightens the load of manual tasks, helps prevent burnout, and gives your team time to concentrate on important projects. AI-powered solutions will keep improving how we detect, investigate, and respond to incidents, making automation a necessity for success within operations.
Get started with PagerDuty automation
PagerDuty provides a powerful and flexible platform to automate incident response, reduce MTTR, protect revenue, and increase operational productivity.
Key benefits of PagerDuty Runbook Automation include:
- Resolve tasks up to 99% faster. Automating tasks like deployments or patching helps your teams act quickly to an incident, speeding up time to resolution.
- Simplify security and compliance. With its embedded authentication, access control, and audit logging, automation can be safely executed in secure, restricted environments.
- Reduce support costs by up to 50%. Automating repetitive tasks and standardizing operational procedures cuts down on wasted time and helps teams concentrate on the task at hand.
To learn more about how to standardize and automate workflows across your organization, explore the full capabilities of PagerDuty automation with a free trial.