Runbook Automation

The value of Runbooks

Runbooks are a critical piece in supporting our products, with well understood the benefits. They provide a defined set of instructions to be carried out in response to an event, this especially critical during moments of stress, like when things are exploding at 3 am.

The value is clear but they are not without their limitations:

  • They quickly become out-of-date, because they are often not seen as important.
  • They still need to be manually executed by an engineer.
  • They require watching to ensure they are working correctly and any errors are caught
  • All of the tasks are very repetitive e.g. restart service, clear up disk space
Outlyer Automation Flow

Your time is too important

What if you could address these limitations? Then you would really bring some power to your operations. The properties of runbooks make them excellent candidates for automation. Now with Outlyer you have the runbook automation tool you have been missing:

  • Save time for your operations teams by automating those repetitive tasks.
  • Improve your service levels by greatly reducing your mean time to repair (MTTR).
  • Improve the lives of your operations team by resolving a lot of incidents before they need to be woken up.
  • An awesome side-effect of codifying these run books is that can be tested to ensure they stay up-to-date.

Key Features

  • Trigger from anywhere: Host down, Service flapping, 3rd-party service notification, even email.
  • Out-of-the-box integrations: Host or service restart, log collection, numerous notifications.
  • Custom actions: Write simple scripts to automate literally anything.
  • Fully auditable: for tracking and security