The promises of IT automation are alluring — saved time, increased efficiency, and standardized IT processes. But how does it work and how do you get started?
In the webinar Take IT Automation to the Next Level, John Emmitt, the Director of Product Marketing at Kaseya and Ronny Tunfjord, IT Automation Expert at Upstream AB, discuss use cases and a few best practices for IT automation. They also cover how you can implement automated, standardized IT processes in an endpoint management tool.
Use Cases for IT Automation
1. Automate Common IT Processes
Routine maintenance tasks and common IT workflows can be automated to increase the productivity of IT professionals. IT automation reduces human intervention to minimal. IT processes like software deployment, patch management, weekly maintenance procedures, and compliance reporting can be automated to improve IT security and IT efficiency.
“With the rise in compliance regulations, automating GDPR compliance reporting and proving that GDPR is complied with, is the need of the hour”, says Ronny Tunfjord.
2. Automate Remediation of IT Incidents
Automated remediation of IT incidents includes defining the events and conditions that we want to monitor in our IT environment. Then, defining the automated process to respond to that event or condition, including executing a script to remediate the problem.
Kaseya VSA performs 6 types of monitoring – four being event-based and two being state-based.
Types of Monitoring:
- Event-Based
- Alerts – Monitors events on agent machines
- Event Log Alerts – Monitors events in the event logs of agent machines
- System Check – Monitors events on non-agent machines
- Log Monitoring – Monitors events in log files
- State-Based
- Monitor Sets – Monitors the performance state on agent machines
- SNMP Sets – Monitors the performance state on non-agent devices.
Once our monitors are set up, the second step in remediation is taking the action based on the alert. This includes creating an alarm, generating a ticket, running a script, or emailing a notification.
The third and final step is creating policies to drive standardized, automated processes.
Upstream Approach to IT Automation
Upstream uses the automation available in the Kaseya VSA framework and leverages it in the Upstream self-service portal. The self-service portal enables end users to fix their common IT issues themselves or to create tickets in the case of the unresolved ones.
IT Automation Best Practices
Here are a few best practices for IT automation:
Start Now
Ronny maintains that IT professionals need not be scripting gurus to automate IT. They could write/adapt a script to automate a small service or their top ten routine tasks and then work their way to more complex processes.
Create Structure
Creating structure includes using standard naming conventions for scripts, folders, and policies. Once automation scripts are created, Ronny advises following a standard procedure of developing the scripts, testing them and then moving them to production folders – a procedure which resonates with DevOps teams.
Take a Proactive Approach
IT professionals should proactively address recurring IT incidents and determine a way to automate the solution to the problem.
Measure the ROI
IT automation returns multiples of the amount of time and effort invested. Calculate your time savings and communicate this value to the organization.
Upstream Power Pack and Kaseya Automation Exchange
Kaseya Automation Exchange is a crowdsourced automation platform where thousands of Kaseya’s customers and partners share, buy, and sell agent procedures, monitor sets, reports, templates, and other types of automation for Kaseya products.
Upstream Power Pack is one such collection of scripts which helps customers using Kaseya to automate IT processes.
Automation helps companies streamline IT processes and dramatically increase productivity. To learn more about IT automation, watch the on-demand webinar Take IT Automation to the Next Level now.
