I didn’t even realize that my post was cut off. I guess I talked(wrote) too much
What you describe does sound quite interesting and useful. As in many things, the terminology is polluted and everyone understand something else when we say “automation”. As you point out, you can automate intelligently but most people see automations that are not so sophisticated, which may be the cause of skepticism you see. almost every product suite claims “automation”, many nothing more than ability to write a script, etc.
How to differentiate what’s good from what’s bad or insufficient? Examples certainly help. I think one solid use case would go a long way. Looking forward to reading more about your thoughts and solutions!

it’s a pity that you post was not complete, because you were mentioning the big point: Most so called automation systems are performing as you described it. This is a key differentiator of our Automation Engine, which is fed by a model of the IT infrastructure and is aware about the dependencies between Machines, Applications, Resources and Services. Depending of the depth of the model our engine can travel through that model and to encircle problems and execute actions defined by the rule set. If required also manual intervention could be defined within the rules, so in really critical situations the admin could be asked. A big plus for automation is, that every single step is documented, so improvements in the rule base are straightforward – this is not guaranteed by a human admin performing under heavy load.

I’m convinced that if one is really honest, some/many admins or even doctors are overwhelmed by huge number factors and decisions leave often room for improvements.

Regards
Roland

Disclaimer: Some years ago I was resonsible for a team administering about 250 servers at 70 hospital-sites, so I claim to know what I’m talking about…

The action the sys admin would have taken can be many different things and may depend on number of factors. Why the service stopped in the first place? does he need to collect data to investigate the root cause of failure later? is it the right time of the day/week/month/year? are there other services hosted on the same server? was there a failover/redundancy server? may restarting it cause other problems?

Of course, automation can have all this information as well and make the right decision to whether or nor restart the service, at least in theory. The problem is that this type of information is often tacit and not captured in computer consumable form.

IMHO, straight forward actions can and should be automated but we still seem to be more comfortable to have human intelligence in the process, in case not all information is captured and hard logic is not suitable for the case. So the lack of “trust” is often not to the computer software but whether we manage to implement sophisticated automation AND provide all the decision making data to allow the automation make the right choice for us.
Restarting a failed service is the most common example given for automation, but as mentioned in the beginning of the command, event that simple task is not always simple.

A typical example of automation going nuts is opening a ticket for critical alarms from monitoring systems. Most of the time this is a great notification, but when something goes wrong and 10,000 alarms are created instead of usual 100, automation proceeds to take down the ticketing system, etc.

If the

In the healthcare industry we have similar discussions, if it would some day be possible that a computer decides, if a certain examination makes sense or not.

My point of view is that a computer, programmed in the right way, has much more computing power and could use much more information for a ‘right’ decision than a human could ever have.
The big question is, at which point of time the computer is allowed to decide on his own and who is reponsible for Dr. computers actions.
This is a very emotional point, though not many people know about and/or fear singularity.