Chris Boos on Automation

After blogging some months about automation, I thought it might be a good idea to talk about the definition of automation. Nearly everyone seems to have an “Automation solution” in place. So what is that Automation-hype all about?

The word Automation is derived from the ancient Greek language and means that something is operating or moving self dictated, which gives quite a good idea about what we are looking at.

Automation might have started with the invention of the wheel decades ago, is omnipresent in many branches and industries and a substancial factor for producing any kind of goods and services today.  Robots and Automated Manufacturing systems and During my journey through the world of IT Service Management, I encountered various kinds of Automation. From my point of view most vendors will agree to the following categorization:

Automated IT-Service Management / ITSM Process Automation

This is a umbrella term for solutions focused on supporting Service Management workflow, usually based on best practices and standards like ITIL or Cobit. Subordinated terms are Support Automation or Run-Book-Automation.

Support Automation

Support Automation refers to software packages are focused on supporting the routine work of help desk personnel. Think of it as a kind of script integration in existing Service desk, CRM application or even in Knowledge Base Applications for Automated Self Service. Examples for this category are products like CA SupportBridge or mValent Integrity, which is focused on Change Management Automation.

Run-Book-Automation

Products belonging to this category are very popular nowadays. They allow to define a set of ITSM-Workflows through a Graphical user interface. Good products offer a multitude of connectors and interfaces to existing ITSM suites like OpenView, Tivoli or Unicenter. Examples for this kind of products are Opalis Integration Server, BMC Realops or HP/Opsware/IConclude Opsforce.

IT-Workload Automation

These concepts stem from early (mainframe) days of computing, where batch processing or job Scheduling were a big improvement, allowing operator to “automate” recurring tasks. Though modern products are highly evolutionized through offering multi platform compatibility, event-triggering, policy-based execution and configured to smart coloured visual GUIs. These products are gaining ground in modern service oriented environments and are represented through products from big vendors like CA/Cybermation and IBM Tivoli or smaller competitors like ASG and UC4

Data Center Automation

This is the hottest topic today, as companies have started to deploy myriad of servers into an extremely fast growing number of data centers all over the world, bringing high demand for automated tools to provision, change and manage vast numbers of components. Any of the large vendor offers such a tool or suite and – you guessed it – here is place, where the bucks go. HP know that story. Products in this category are former Opsware Server Automation System, BMC BladeLogic, IBM Tivoli Provisioning Manager and to bring in some cloudy haze modern and cool products/players like Elastra or 3Tera/Applogic which allow to mix data center and cloud offerings.

Roland

I should be the last person, to say that automation is a simple concept – I make my money on automation. And often people really think that “a technical concept behind automation” is the hard part – well let me tell you: it is not. The technical concept of automation is something deeply embedded in the binary way our It works. The technical principle behind automation simply is

IF (a complex condition) IS TRUE THEN (do something)

So does that sound familiar? And we have not even introduced the concept of ELSE, ELIF or CASE yet J. Well we can put this into a little more technical terms by saying:

Automation is the condition based execution of actions to ensure the quality of service of an IT environment. Where conditions can be combined from expressions covering all aspects of the IT environment in question and actions can be one or a serious of command execution in one or many locations of the IT environment regarded.

So to go back to the divide and conquer there that was so useful in solving many IT problems we have to ask ourselves three questions:

1. 003366;">What is the IT environment and what are the interdependencies within this environment?
2. 003366;">What are the expressions “a complex condition” is composed of and what is the data evaluated in these expressions?
3. 003366;">What are the actions to be taken and where are they to be executed?

So let us try to answer the three questions. First the IT environment and its interdependencies can be modeled. The entities the environment s composed of all “configuration items” that are part of the environment in questions. The interdependencies are relations between these entities. The “detail questions” to be solved are: At what level of detail do we model, and what kind of relationship model will we use? Well answering those will take us into a specific implementation of IT automation, and we are right now looking at the concept behind all these implementations, so let us stay at this level of abstraction.

Second the expressions evaluated in order to know which actions to execute are embedded in the knowledge of the administrators doing exactly this job today. So the expressions and conditions could be classified as the knowledge database put into machine readable for. The data needed to evaluate the expressions – after we know what they are – is all data available on the IT environment we are looking at. This includes technical monitoring data, end-to-end monitoring data, data processing information, transaction monitoring but it also includes quality of service information, KPIs, SLA information and business impact data – basically anything we can get hold of.

And third actions are the things administrators and gurus enter via keyboard, mouse or telepathic network link in order to make the “bad condition” go away. An action can be a simple command on one system but it can also be a series of commands (maybe with conditional execution) or even scripts of commands distributed to many systems. So an action can be as simple as /etc/init.d/apache restart or it can be something as complex as a 10.000 line program, some SQL scripts and a shell script executed on a dozen machines. But in the end these actions are put together today – as scripts and How-to in the system administrators’ dens of the world.

So you see. Automation is something simple: We should know about our IT environment and the interdependencies of its entities anyway. We know about the conditions – or at least we can find out – and then execute actions (some of which we have already put into scripts or programs to make life easier). So automation is just a centralization and connection of things we are already doing.