Chris Boos on Automation

Coming to PULSE 2010 almost felt like coming to a friend I had not seen for a long time. The setup is very similar to last year´s with some little improvements. Obviously the conference committee was actually reading many of the suggestions given. For example the temperature in the conference center is no longer below freezing… Well PULSE started off as usual with Al Zoller coming on stage and getting all of us on track. “All of us” means more than 5.500 IT professionals who have come to Las Vegas despite tight budgets and economic crises. Al Zoller announced that this year IT service management at Tivoli is all about integration. After the idea of breaking down silos of competence integration – between the remaining silos (?) and especially between all the tools and processes we find in IT service management today is a great idea and actually long overdue. The scenarios and examples presented in Al Zoller´s and other first day keynotes are still very much in the shadow of economic downturn. Even though every manager is emphasizing that we are in a recovery phase their choice of case studies in the keynotes either shows that they are still skeptical (like most top managers) about the sustainability of the recovery or that in 2009 Tivoli did only do successful projects in more or less crises resistant sectors like energy, government or PPP. Since I do not believe the latter (Tivoli is just too big for that) I would say Tivoli top management is on the same page as many other executives, who make a great public appearance telling everyone that the crises is over but do not quite believe so internally – at least not yet. Following Al Zoller´s keynote address we had the chance to look at an example of integrated service management or rather an example of the applied theory of smarter planets. The demo was about Las Vegas and the Venetian as a smarter city or building respectively. The demo was quite staged and the Tivoli executives on stage had to struggle with their acting skills. Personally I do not believe in the usefulness of the kinds of dashboards shown in the presentations, but it seems this is what customers are looking for at the moment, so IBM was right on spot showing what could be done and how these dashboards interacted with all the data sources and process management systems. Speaking of data sources, I think if we are really going into the direction of a smarter planet and the internet of things, the term information overload will gather new meaning over the next couple of years.

The guest keynote given by former vice president Al Gore was the best guest keynote at any PULSE so far. I had heard that Al Zoller was criticized harshly for inviting Al Gore as an environmentalist, because IBM has such a strong customer base in the energy and traditional industry sector. Well guys, get real – oil will only be there for about 50 years (if that long) and Exxon et al are also looking into other concepts. Personally I would prefer if everyone was doing research about nuclear fusion as the energy source of the future, but taking nature as an example is maybe too far out for parts of the environmental movement. Al Gore was absolutely authentic, convincing and just fun. And he got everybody to think about their behavior, especially giving a speech on energy efficiency in a city like Las Vegas. As Al Gore said, the next generation will ask us either the question “How did you do it” or “Didn´t you see it coming”. So congratulations for Al Zoller for taking the initial heat when inviting Al Gore. More than 5.500 attendees at the opening session of PULSE 2010 were enthusiastic about the speakers and the integration message of IBM as well as the sustainability message of Mr. Gore on behalf of mankind.

Looking at PULSE I have seen many more client presentations and case studies than last year. And – coming back to a point I made before – these presentations are mainly not about state funded endeavors, but about companies dealing with the economic down turn successfully in one way or the other. Tivoli has also introduced the opportunity to meet reference customers in one-on-one talks and start an exchange on their experience with Tivoli products, which I think is a great idea – especially after seeing the customer panel discussion as part of the second day´s general session and the positive audience feedback to the panel. Even though the CIOs of several major international companies were not really sharing any news when talking about their efforts to deal with integration issues and reengineering their IT business alignment, getting these guys up on the main stage to openly declare that IBM was helping them to achieve their goals made everybody else walk out with a secure feeling. Not just great marketing, but obviously also a job well done on the part of the IBM Tivoli engineers, project teams and account managers.

Some of the session presentations were of a little less quality than the ones I had seen in previous years. Maybe that is because everybody was very busy fighting IT budget cuts and the economic crises itself, but the content of most presentations was as good as I have gotten used to over the last three years. The only thing I am a little disappointed about so far is the track on Cloud Computing. This track is still very much about why clouds make sense and other theories that have long since been proven by reality. But some of the customer presentations (e.g. CSC or ITricity) had really good cloud examples. Maybe IBM feels that they still have to pick up the cloud skeptics by introducing them from the beginning, but I think the PULSE attendees are more cloud worthy than that. I have had no time to take a look at the new track on medium sized business, because the first two days are so packed with must see presentations that I simply could not spare the hour. But I am sure I will get around to the topic tonight.

The second day´s keynotes were dominated by Harriet Person – or as I said Ms. Security. Her presentation on regarding the integration of security into embracing change as an opportunity rather than being paranoid about all the things that could happen was authentic, fun and well received by the audience. The presentation also made the best points so far on the integration topic and its actual business effects (apart from all the effects of technical integration that I will not mention here, because those should have been addressed a while back). I already mentioned the customer panel which was a great idea of the conference designers. Some of the other talks in the 2nd day´s general sessions were a little dull to me.

I must give a little note on the usage of social media at this year´s IBM PULSE. Twitter screens all over the place, blogger meetings and lots of coverage on all kinds of channels have made it clear that IBM is serious about the social media community. Not integrating twitter into the main sessions however also shows that there is still skepticism about the uncontrollability or the enormous demands of interaction required by social media. I am sure the very positive coverage PULSE has gotten so far on twitter and blogs will give Tivoli´s senior management a hint as to the topic of being skeptics.

Talking and thinking about automation so much can be like sitting in a forest and not seeing the wood from the trees. Only recently I have discovered that some of the ideas we are already applying at arago are a step beyond what is generally called IT automation. Therefore I want to give a clear picture of what is possible compared to what is widely known to be top of the pops automation technology.

Automation Tools for Stressed out Admins

As you have seen in previous posts, there are many buzzwords describing automation technology and they are all more or less cool and more or less useful approaches towards making the process of maintaining ever more dynamic IT and application landscapes. But this is not where it stops. All of these tools just take a part of the work process, wrap it into a nice user interface and hopefully standardized configuration. None of these tools actually does the maintenance work, takes the necessary decisions or finds solutions to upcoming problems or adequate answers to imminent questions. But that is what we want, isn´t it? So what we want is something to automatically use all these automation tools to “just do the job”, something to automate the automation.
The best way to explain these different automation tools and their application in IT is comparing IT maintenance to flying an aircraft. In order to keep the plane up and running there are many different tools and technologies that automate the actual flying process. There are also many systems that automate the task of executing all the commands that originate from the flight support systems. These commands are transported to the actual aircraft mechanics where changes in the wing positions, thrust, flaps etc are executed.  All these systems themselves automate manual tasks. A pilot flying a modern aircraft no longer has to manually move parts but uses automation tools to do the job for him. Still he is flying the plane. For tedious standard situations our pilot has another tool, called the autopilot. This system does the job of the pilot in such standard situations. The autopilot uses all the other automation tools aboard the aircraft to perform the task of keeping the plane up in the skies. Theoretically the autopilot would only call for assistance when it cannot cope with the situation at hand and that is when the pilot has to step in.

Autopilot Approach to IT Maintenance

It is exactly the same in IT. With all the automation tools around, you should use an auto pilot that can handle all kinds of standard situations when managing incidents, problems, changes, IT capacity and overall availability. At the core of this auto pilot for IT operations is an autopilot engine. A large set of possible actions is stored within this engine. The job of the engine is to combine and recombine these possible actions to resolve any upcoming issues automatically. Only when it encounters a situation it cannot resolve after applying possible actions should it contact the IT experts and ask for their assistance.
This approach changes an IT expert from someone who has all kinds of good automation tools at his fingertips but is constantly battered and chased by important and urgent issues to an expert who is contacted only when his expertise is required.

003366;">This auto pilot approach minimizes the probability of human error (which is constantly high in IT operations, as there is always more than one task that needs attention in a normal environment), guarantees short reaction time, relieves the IT experts of tedious standard tasks and give them time to concentrate on important and interesting issues. An autopilot in IT operations pushes the job of an IT expert up the value chain and improves service quality at the same time.

Cloud Computing was a big topic at this year´s EMC World in Orlando. I think it is a given that virtualization is a pre requirement for any kind of Cloud concept that can be implemented today and thus EMC is playing a vital role in the Cloud space with VMware. Following the “keynote” on Cloud Computing and virtualization on Tuesday showed quite well what EMC expects. First of all I want to mention, that I thought it a pretty neat idea to turn a keynote into a panel discussion, because that demonstrates the impact Cloud Computing has on IT – it touches every part of IT and thus every part of a major vendor like EMC gets involved.

EMC World - Cloud Keynote Discussion

The discussion clearly showed that EMC is thinking of what can be done with the Cloud today rather than proposing the overall concept and waiting for it to be technically possible. For EMC Clouds have to tackle the space of legacy applications rather than requiring the users to rewrite all their software. In my opinion this is the absolutely logical step and therefore I liked the content showing how different concepts at EMC support making today´s applications “Cloud ready”. The biggest step into this direction is VMware´s latest release of vSphere that enables outtasking of compute resources on demand while turning the hardware available internally into a resource pool that can be allocated flexibly and automatically. This is supported by resource and system management software as well as storage. It is all done by adding management capacities and predefined behavior to the virtualization capabilities already available and by bringing other components closer to the virtual world by adding direct control over hardware though interfaces to the management program driving and allocating the virtual resources. This concept creates a resource pool out of all involved components (storage, network, compute) that can be allocated dynamically. The feature that tops up the concept is the ability to externalize such services if peak loads require additional resources.

By simulating the environments we are using today and bringing this simulation into such an dynamic space a pre Cloud becomes reality very quickly. This is what can realistically be done today and this is what makes Cloud concepts available to legacy application, short term project requirements as well as test and integration environments.

For my taste the fact that the Cloud concept would require the reprogramming of all software was a little overdone. Yes, I too believe that there is no way dynamic parallelization of computation cannot be reached unless you write programs for such a kind of super dynamic scheduler (like Google does).But this is where computing is headed in the long run. To try and reimplement everything on the spot is absolutely unrealistic and therefore the concepts of bringing at least some of the benefits of Cloud concepts to today´s applications and architects is great. But to say that reimplementation can be avoided in a very long term perspective is just incorrect. I think we should have learned something from the immense cost generated by maintaining the big monolithic legacy apps we do rely on today (If you want something, you make something new because changing the old think to look new will create more cost through maintenance in the long run).

Last but not least the EMC team emphasized many times, that the VMware approach created much less dependencies for customers than giving their applications into the proprietary domains of Google App Engine (where your program only runs with the Google API) or Amazon EC2 (where the virtual machine itself is hard to retrieve once deployed). This is a valid point. And despite the hype created around Amazon EC2 or Google App Engine this addresses the fear of many business users. On the other hand one should state too that EMC as well is building features into their “Cloud OS” that make a customer “want” to use EMC hardware and other EMC preferred services. All in all EMC is doing a good job of opening up the specs and standards for these kind of dependencies enabling other providers to step into the world of VMware and be just as well integrated.

In the long run I am sure standards for Cloud machine images, templates and Cloud programming interfaces will evolve. I think this will be an evolutionary process rather than the job of a standardization committee, because the Cloud idea spreads so quickly and many many different concepts are being tried out every day. Survival of the fittest is not the worst thing to happen here.

As one should save the best for last I can say now that EMC management and engineers obviously understand the need for more effective automation technologies. The discussion returned to the point that such very dynamic infrastructures and environments simply can no longer be managed manually and that the current toolsets available in system and resource management will have to take major steps towards actually automating the maintenance process fully. So in the eyes of EMC and VMWare management and engineering the operational auto pilot discussed in this blog many times and actually implemented in the aAE (arago Automation Engine) is not just a good way for cost cutting or freeing up resources for innovation and change, but becomes an absolute necessity in a dynamic environment where the speed of change is too high to be reflected in human experience. Thus I conclude that the idea of preserving these experiences within an automation engine as described before is the best way to protect investment into these experiences.

You will definitely find more information on Chuck´s Blog and for a more day to day recap you can look at Len´s Blog

Chris Boos is attenting the IT Automation Summit on BrightTALK.com on 7th of April 14:00 CET. All webcasts will be recorded and are available for download afterwards.

000080;">Warning: This post contains just as much sarcasm as it contains serious content.

In many discussions I have founds that grasping the concept of automation is alien to most people´s mindset. Are you one of them? Do you really prefer to work your butt off doing seriously dull stuff than sitting in an arm chair with a cocktail? Or if you are not that lazy, do you really prefer mind numbing repetitive tasks to trying out thrilling new things or finding an elegant solution to a tricky problem? (Well, if you answered yes to any of these, please go and visit some soap opera or sitcom blog instead and never ask yourself why your life is soooo boring that you need to tune into life somewhere else….)

So you are still reading? 000080;">Glad to meet you. I do believe that most great inventions were made because we are a lazy kind of animal. The only thing that can get us out of our laziness is something stimulating to our brains. Everything else we try to get rid of. Usually we start out with the low hanging fruits and move on to more complex problems from there. E.g. inventing the wheel meant getting rid of the need to carry everything on our backs, using many people to transport a heavy item or it meant using fewer people or animals to do the same job (ancient form of cost cutting and let us not talk about the invention of sliced bread here). An example of a more complex problem would be managing a Web Portal with 1.2 Million transactions a day that is connected to three different ERP Systems using two different SOA approaches and so on…

Corporate Culture without Automation

Are we back to the point where you say “that cannot or should not be automated”? Yes it can, and yes it should be automated, because once you know how to handle the everyday hick-ups of even this complex IT environment you become very bored with it. Well you might say, if that really is automated then the job of administrating this stuff will be gone – so what? So were the jobs of the people who used to carry the bricks to the pyramids when they all of a sudden started using wheels and carts. And guess what…. Since then the population and average wealth of people has increased greatly. And one more interesting piece of information… The people who started using the wheels right away got much richer or at least had much more fun that those “traditionalists” who said carrying bricks is supposed to be done manually. Why is that? Well because management liked to get things done quicker and cheaper… Sound familiar? Well, management has much fancier titles today than “just” pharaoh.
Well back to serious business, I guess you get the point – progress in IT administration is on its way and stopping it is not an option – especially not in the current economic situation.
So what do all these great inventions that really took work off our backs do? They conserve knowledge collected by hard work and experience and apply and reapply them. 

So conserving knowledge on how complex IT environments are managed is what we set out to dowhen developing the arago Automation Engine (ff0000;">aAE). Looking back at our operations we have done quite well. We are now able to handle roughly 68% of all issues coming up during the day automatically and only deal with the interesting ones manually. This is also why our administrators actually have an interesting job compared to the ones who do the same thing over and over and over again – just to keep busy.

So what do we do? We take a model of the IT environment and collect all the tiny steps necessary to keep this environment up and running at all times. These tiny steps are then generalized, so they can be applied and reapplied as needed. The big invention behind this is the algorithm that actually analyzes incoming issues and finds out which of the tiny administrative steps need to be combined in order to resolve these issues. So automated IT operation is the conservation of IT experience and knowledge as well as a fairly smart machine (not quite as cool as the wheel, but getting there) which knows how and when to apply these experiences.

PS: Downloaded and actually licensed that cartoon from www.CartoonStock.com… Really love it.

The history of delivering IT Services is certainly an evolutionary process. This is not even considering the huge evolution that has taken place in the technology available to deliver such services. The evolution in IT delivery or IT operation is more or less an evolution of tools. It began with the host operating systems where much of the software that came with the computer was only used to manage the machine itself. Skipping many steps, these tools went through the various stages of network and system management to business service management or business transaction management tools. The latter’s claim to fame is actually achieving what business service management set out to do – making IT manageable from a business point of view.

Automation Auto Pilot

Speaking abstractly all these tools are automation tools. They automate several steps of work that an IT operator, administrator or delivery manager previously had to perform manually. But they are still just tools. They make life easier for the one who is doing the job, but would you call an industrial hammer an automation tool? Therefore I think it is time to take a look into the fish tank of (IT-)tools and approaches available today and show how evolution points towards engines (not so much the tools) that actually decide what to do and then take the action autonomously – only asking for permission, reassurance or assistance if required by process or if no solution is available to them. Such an engine could be called an automation auto pilot and is sitting on top of all the tools available to IT experts today.

We have been developing and using such an engine for more than ten years now and have achieved very good results in quality improvement, availability of documentation as part of compliance and cost cutting. But why do I most strongly believe that this is not an exotic idea, but the logical next step?

If we focus on the two dimensions IT management tool that can takes actions automatically or facilitate taking complex actions on a complex IT and application landscape, we end up with a trigger axis and an approach axis. The trigger axis describes under what conditions an action or tool invocation is triggered. The approach axis describes what kind of action will be taken and how flexible these actions can be taking the trigger conditions into account.

At the left of the trigger axis (x) we place “scheduled”, in the middle “event triggered” and at the right automated. This means that a tool positioned to the far left of the trigger axis will take action at a predefined time. Tools placed in the middle will take action if certain events occur and tools to the far right will take action as they become necessary. On the approach axis we placed “standardized” at the bottom, “rationalized” in the middle and “dynamic” at the top. This means that tools that perform predefined actions without reacting to any information gathered while executing (e.g. cron scripts), would be placed on the bottom, tools following a predefined process but building branches into the process that take current conditions into account would be placed in the middle and tools that combine the best process to be taken for the given situation out of a pool of possible actions are placed on top.

Tool Classification Dimensions

Placing the tools and concepts currently on the market onto these axes will show a clear evolutionary development from a scheduled standardized batch process to an engine that combines possible actions to a solution as the situation requires. The auto pilot function that I was talking about earlier is such a tool that would be placed up and to the right on our chart of automation evolution.

In the chart presented below, the placement of “hot” topics such as data center automation, work load automation and even run book automation are much more “old school” in their approaches and are therefore placed accordingly. Our auto pilot engine clearly takes up the “new approach” position – with a very notable difference – we have been running a successful business on this model for a long time. Thus this is not a fancy idea, but a valid approach and current trends in management software are pointing to exactly this approach.

Automation Auto Pilot as Trend

Maybe this “sorting of the tools” article has helped a little to place other thoughts on automation published here. It will certainly be necessary when we look at why dynamic automation becomes more and more unavoidable as complexity and change rate increase. E.g. following the current discussions on cloud computing from the Atlanta cloud camp organized by John Willis or even the dynamically evolving enterprise clouds as described by Mark Masterson, an automation auto pilot is the only way to keep track of an IT landscape that is fully distributed and dynamic. Just solving the problem of distributed computing and dynamic resources from an OS point of view by creating good cloud managers or VMs does not solve the problem of keeping business applications alive and available with proper execution quality and correct business results. If any of you have ever configured e.g. the Tivoli Correlation Engine in an Enterprise console successfully you know how much work that is. Putting your environment in a cloud would essentially mean you would have to review all correlation rues every time the cloud manager changes your environment. Not possible you say – well that was only the correlation engine. No other system management, IT service management or business service management tool or visualization was even touched. So you see, something will have to be done in order to keep the actual delivery of business services up and running when moving to a fully dynamic environment – this something is an autonomous automation engine or an automation auto pilot.

The terms 000080;">003366;">tool and 003366;">automation do not go well together. Taking a look at other more mature sectors a tool is an item used by either a human or a machine and automation in this context it means that work is done by a machine rather than by a human.

Still the IT industry is lively talking about automation tools and a great many to start with. For a long time I could not get a grip on what all these tools were good for and why so many categories are around. This is why you find a map of the classes of tools around. I chose 003366;">two 003366;">dimensions to lay out the map of tools. Since we are talking about a 003366;">map of tools naturally the users of these tools are the first dimension. The second dimension is the part of IT the tool in question is focused upon.

The user dimension starts at actual IT administrator, continues with business users and ends at managers. The IT dimension starts at the facility level going on to infrastructure, network, systems, services, applications and ending in business processes. You will find this map in the figure included below.

Automation Tool Map

Looking at this map, I have come to the following conclusions:

1.       NSM covers the smallest piece of the map while being the oldest toolset around. When NSM tools came out they were supposed to be used by everyone and save the world. Becoming a mature setup of tools they have clearly found their niche and will definitely stay and important piece in the big IT puzzle. Not much revolution is to be expected here, but some continuous refinement can still bring big steps in effectiveness of these tools.

2.       BSM on the contrary covers the biggest part of the map and surely is one of the newer approaches. I think BSM is a great idea but it has to go though some iterations of focusing in order to be applicable to an average IT and business landscape. Introducing BSM not – the way in should be – means turning everything inside out and even though the economic crises does put a lot of pressure on companies businesses have more important things to focus on that having themselves turned inside out by a changing IT.

3.       BTM is a practical approach to achieve some of the goals – especially in the accounts of visualization and quality management – set by BSM without having to turn over every stone in our IT.

4.       I really do not understand the hype around DCA and Run Book Automation. While DCA seems a logical step (is not IT centralization itself, so its management should be centralized) Run Book Automation actually solves the “problem of missing documentation” – maybe. Other industries would never start their processes without having a clear set of procedures in place how to handle foreseeable situations. Imagine what we would tell an energy provider running a nuclear power planed if they came up and says “sure, we develop best practices how to react to glitches in the systems we go”. No way Hose! So the big buzzword of Run Book Automation is just a fancy way to get the sometimes anarchic IT guys to document what they are doing…

5.       All these tools claim to be focused on automation and most of them may carry some minor seeds of automation in them, but they are in the end clearly focused to be tools. They want to be used by someone (or something) to perform their tasks and they do not act by themselves. So in this map of software used in IT delivery or IT operations the actual automation engine is still missing.

003366;">Part of the latter conclusion makes me happy, because this means we are one of the few people who actually have a machine that operates It by itself and does it automatically at that part. On the other hand this give me the creeps, because this means a lot of people and companies are not ready yet to have IT delivery run in large part autonomously. Looking at al other industries this is the way they have gone and I do think it is about time we get the noting in the IT world.. Let´s get rid of all the boring tasks and let them be handled by the machines. Yes this means giving some control to an engine but on the other hand it means your business is much more in control because reaction becomes predictable and is documented, as well as IT jobs become more interesting since the everyday stuff is nothing IT gurus have to deal with.

For those of you not quite so familiar with IT delivery buzzword bingo here is the elaboration of the abbreviations: NSM = Network and Systems Management – tools aimed at facilitating tasks performed by network and system administrators. ITSM = IT Service Management – tools aimed at supporting the ITIL Service management processes from a delivery point of view. RBA = Run Book Automation – tools aimed at giving staff the proper procedure for handling a given situation. DCA = Data Center Automation – tools used to perform tasks from a central point of administration rather than having to connect to all servers or services involved. ITPM = IT Process Management – tools used to track and escalate processes and communication between the silos of It delivery and also business users. WLA = Work Load Automation – a much spoken set of tools to automatically provision IT resources and distributing workload across these systems as required. BPM = Business Process Management – tools used to improve IT´s alignment with business processes though modeling It from a business point of view. BSM = Business Service Management – a set of tools used to manage IT services from a pure business point of view. BTM = Business transaction Management – a quite new approach to tools created to manage IT with business transaction as the controlling parameter. This seems to be a practical approach to narrow down the too broad view of BSM as you can read at Doug McClure´s blog.

Talking about automation on the way to IBM PULSE 2009 got me some interesting insights. I did know that most people do not really feel comfortable, when a machine actually acts autonomically. But that most people would expect to actually get a tool that forces them to click though their whole IT infrastructure and application landscape in order to DO something was really astonishing to me.

Why? Well because we have been working so differently for many years now. Thus I feel obliged to give some examples of automating tasks in an environment like the one I have been writing about for almost a year now. Maybe some of the things you found quite interesting will become clearer after reading this practical example.

Ok, let us think you would want to automate the task of deleting a user across your IT landscape. A rule we have entered years ago and have been using ever since. In an automated environment like ours all you would have to do is set an „issue“ onto the automation engine bus that says „delete user XYZ‘. This issue will be set upon the graph of the IT dependency model and look for any node that has rules attached to it that know how to handle „something“ with the data „user“ and the action „delete“. For this issue the graph of the IT dependency model will reduce itself to these nodes that know how to handle it. The issue will then map out a road though the nodes –this is what the engine does and this is the real secret behind automation. Each node the issue visits will perform some action – in accordance with the rules – and will return some input to the engine. The engine can  make out whether it needs to add additional nodes onto the issue’s travel list, remove nodes – because some other action has already taken care of the demands of the issue requesting action, or whether the issue in resolved, because there are not more actions to be taken. If the latter is the case the engine will look for any other issue that may be able to use or issue’s data and if that isn‘t the case, dismiss the task as completed.

So what does this mean practically?

For every OS you have to write one action rule that specifies how to delete a user. For every kind of directory or IAM application you have running you will have to write a rule respectively. That‘s it! These are probably scripts you have anyway and you simply upload them into the engine with the rules. The engine will determine what nodes the rule should attach itself to and will execute the rule for any issue that seems suitable.

So compared to a system where you actually have to define what to do where before it will delete a user across your infrastructure this is remarkably simple. Not only the time for deleting a user will go down from 40 minutes to 1 as some other vendors say, but the time for installing this neat gadget will go down from 2 days to 0 because the rule is already there for most OS and IAM solutions. If you really want to add some exotic system, then you will probably need 10 mins to do so.

So the next logical step in automation is not just improving the tool that lets you execute some commands, maybe remotely or maybe with a good archive of scripts, but to have an intelligent tool that will actually work for you. You tell it the result you want, in this case remove user, and it will find out how to go about to achieve this result.

Deleting a user is a change and most likely an unplanned one as such. The same technology can also be applied when reacting to incidents, problems or user error reports. Then you can tell the engine that the desired end result is that you want the problem to go away. It will find out what to do where in your IT infrastructure by itself and it will do it – well maybe it will go and ask you for permission though integration into a process management system, (that is the way we do it) for some critical actions, but other than that it actually goes on and does the job – it actually figures out what to do, follows through and documents all actions taken.

So there is not much difference between what you use as automation today and what AUTOMATION can actually do from a „do I have to be afraid“ point of view. But there is a great difference in result. An automation technology, that will actually figure things out will much better align to business requests, work with a changing IT landscape and will integrate into all the ITIL operating processes.

000080;">Got you interested? See some examples at IBM PULSE 2009 tomorrow. Conference Center 123, 3:30-4:40pm. See you there….

I finally find the time to write to you on the integration of automated IT operating into today´s working environment. One should think that automation means that just some other tool will be installed into the void of the IT service management jungle and maybe some administrators use this tool and become a lot better and a lot faster. Actually that is exactly what I am NOT talking about. If you are interested in my opinion on the “Automation Market” you will read an article here soon. So what I am talking about is more of an auto pilot – a machine that actually looks at problems and chooses to take action.

The question I am always beeing asked is ‘does this integrate with an established working environment and established processes e.g. ITIL?’ Yes it does. Indeed it needs established processes to function properly. An automation engine like ours (ff0000;">aAE) basically replaces the initial contact to IT experts.

Fig 1 - classic ITIL incident management

Let us look at the ITIL V2 and V3 incident management process for example. As you probably know (see figure 1) a normal ITIL incident management process is either initiated by an alarm from some monitoring system or by a user contacting the helpdesk. The helpdesk handles all the bureaucracy and then passes the incident on to the IT experts who will perform further analysis – if required collect additional data and perform additional analysis – and then either take immediate action to produce a solution or initiate a change process to take this action. As you can see in figure 2 in an automated incident management process the automation engine takes the place of these IT experts. This also includes the engine communicating with the helpdesk, performing additional analysis, requesting additional data, documenting its actions and so forth. When the automation engine cannot find a solution it will contact the IT experts and ask them to step in. Only this time the experts will get a well analyzed incident with most of the boring work and analysis already done and well documented so they can actually work on something new and interesting.

fig. 2 - ITIL incident management with automation

This is how we introduced this auto pilot into our own ITIL compliant IT service management unit. We promised the real technical experts that they would never be bored to death by everyday tasks and tedious busywork. Instead the engine puts only these problems on their desk where an expert as such is actually required and can use his or her talent instead of just keeping mindlessly occupied. If you want to read some more on the human element and concerns connected with the introduction of automation you might want to look at the article “Plays Well with Others” written by Ellen Fussell Policastro last August. In this Article automation is looked upon not in an IT sense but in an industrial sense. This environment deals with change more practically than just IT and therefore it is probably an early adopter for the automation change on its way now.

So you can see that in an environment with well defined processes it is very easy to place an automation engine or an IT operating auto pilot. In an organization that does not have IT operating processes in place yet, just finding the proper interfaces for the automation engine and redefining the roles of the IT experts is probably a piece of work for Sisyphus.

fig. 3 - ITIL integration of automation

Incident management is just one example of how an automation engine that actually acts like an auto pilot can be integrated to dramatically reduce cost in IT operation while simultaneously increasing quality and making the jobs of IT experts much more interesting. As can be seen from figure 3 the automation engine places itself between CMDB with enterprise monitoring system and the process layer actually involving IT experts. This is not only valid for the reactive ITIL processes like incident or problem management but also for proactive processes such as availability or capacity management where our autopilot engine will itself invoke work load automation tools in order to up- or downscale an IT environment according to predicted usage and demand.

This level of integration into established processes and behavioral patterns of technical advanced staff is very rare for a tool that radically changes the workload of IT operating teams, service managers. So this approach is one of the few roads available to actually move one step ahead in an environment that produces ever more complex IT applications, interdependencies between IT services and speed of change within the environment. Just think about the kind of pressure a fully cloud computing based banking data center would put on administrators…

They would have to cope with a dynamically changing environment, changing dependencies and rapidly changing communication matrixes. Automation could handle the ordinary tasks in such an environment without being pressurized by speed and changing preconditions and contact IT experts with exact and well documented information when an unknown issue occurs – relieving them of the pressure generated by the dynamic IT environment and making much more use of their actual expertise. If that is not what we want (I could not really see a reason) it is certainly what we need to keep up with a changing world without further demolishing the image of the IT-Crowd.

Friends,

if I caught your interest in the topic of automation and you would like to see what we have achieved so far, you can see me at this year´s PULSE in Las Vegas. I will give a presentation on “Automation — The Key Factor in Producing and Maintaining Integrated IT Services” there.

Here is a short Abstract of what I will cover in the session:

Automation in IT operations reduces effort while increasing service quality. Integrating IT and ITSM processes are the focus. Today we can implement shared IT services and on-demand IT resources such as Clouds. But how is this ever-growing complexity managed while making availability a commodity to business? As cost increases are not acceptable, automation is “the future.” In this session you will learn about the possibilities of automation and automatic IT operations. Best practices and knowledge of experienced system engineers are conserved and multiplied, thus reducing manual labor while simultaneously pushing expertise up the value chain.

I am looking forward to many interesting discussions and meetings. If you want to schedule a personal get-together, please feel free to contact me.

Chris