Managing a self-hosted server is easy. But when it comes to an enterprise setup with thousands of servers, manual intervention is a herculean task. The time taken for manual remediation is detrimental to the IT infrastructure. With the world running towards a zero downtime goal, every second in the mean time to repair (MTTR) matters. How do enterprises maintain low MTTR? With automation.
Automation used to be the buzz word before AI took over. Every issue was met with a question, "can we automate the solution?" and rightly so. Automation is the quick-fix to most of the problems and it gives breathing time while your sysadmins and SREs fixed the root cause.
Now that many organizations have moved to AI, you may wonder if it still makes sense to use automation. Automation is still your trusty solution to patch your IT facets without over-complicating things.
In short, wherever beneficial. Let us see what those beneficial aspects are.
Servers are sophisticated machines running on the simple logic: keep the server resources healthy and your IT infrastructure will be healthy. An unresponsive server can be a result of any or all of these reasons:
To combat an unhealthy IT infrastructure, automate the monitoring of these four key server resources: CPU, memory, disk, and network. Alerts should automatically reach the directly responsible individuals (DRIs) via automation setup. In high-transaction environments, automate the alerts for intrinsic details like:
Ideally, any spikes or anomalous patterns in these metrics should automatically reach you. This setup should be in place at the implementation phase itself; if not, the second best time is now.
Once the alerts reach the DRI, automation should already be working to resolve the problem. It can be a script that could delete the "temp" files and free up space, a command to restart the most resource-intensive process, or a runbook that is designed to kick-start the healing process.
Automated patch management is a highly debated topic. Patches are rolled out when a vulnerability is detected. Chances are great that the vulnerability has been exploited for a while and before the patch was issued. By the time the patch has reached you, it is often too late. Staying up to date with patches is vital for your IT security.
While some decision makers want the latest GA patches available on their servers immediately, some professionals tend to analyze them first-hand and then deploy the patches. Either way, your IT infrastructure should have an automation pathway that deploys patches on all servers either automatically or at the instant a patch is approved.
The more valuable your business is, the more robust your backup and recovery mechanism should be. In the unfortunate event of a server becoming unresponsive, the backup image should be readily available. Usually, the image is applied manually, but with automation, the recovery process can start almost instantaneously. Your disaster recovery plan—in other words, the business continuity plan—should include automation wherever possible. Waiting for manual intervention is costly for several reasons.
Windows provides its own Windows backup service, and there are tools available for Linux. Even with automated backups, knowing these key details is essential:
Recently, users of a leading e-commerce website were able to access the website, look at the catalog, and add products to the catalog. The problem was they could not buy products, a clear indicator of a micro-service being down. Depending on your IT infrastructure, this type of problem could be in macro-elements like your content delivery network, load balancer, or with your server resources. Sometimes, it can be at a granular level, like a container, process, service, or application going down. When anything goes wrong, you should be aware of it instantly, so the remediation setup can address the appropriate service level. An exceptional automation setup also starts the remediation process in addition to just alerting users.
Logs don't lie, but only if they are managed properly. Log collection, analysis, and reporting should be automatic. Otherwise, your logs could reach the TB levels easily, and for the untrained eye, it could be just a mountain of fluff.
To understand better, what if one your server EventLog has entries 4625 and 4670—both of which can indicate a brute-force attack—but these entries are under thousands of lines in an EventLog file and hidden among the thousands of servers you have. Ask yourself these questions:
Automation can and should answer all these questions. Once the automated alerts are received, a dedicated remediation action should be triggered. The remediation action can be anything: simple command execution, API call, or a server restart.
In earlier days, here is how the timeline of scaling up often happened.
With most businesses today, competition is fierce, so it's important to provide responses to customers and resolve operational issues promptly. Automatic scaling is often preferable for scaling up to improve the customer experience and address IT server performance concerns, and scaling down to identify expenses that can be reduced or eliminated to improve operational efficiency.
When your servers are being pushed to their limits, you should have servers to share their load with, also known as auto-scaling. If the servers are underutilized, they should be allocated to other applications that have better uses for them. A typical enterprise has around a thousand to ten thousand servers and virtual machines.
While the cloud infrastructure has handled this automatically, your on-premises servers have to be automated to scale and balance loads depending on inventory and usage.
These are the key steps to implement automation:
Automation is a sophisticated tool. If it is not configured properly, the damages can impact your resources. As an example, you can look at the Microsoft Azure outage in 2024 that was triggered by a cybersecurity attack. At the onset of the attack, the defense systems responded automatically and were generally effective in minimizing damage. But an error in the configuration or at the implementation level caused the defense system to amplify the impact of the attack rather than mitigate it. From this unfortunate incident, we learn that it's crucial to configure your automation setup cautiously.
Puppet: This tool automates the delivery and operation of software.
Ansible: Ansible playbooks help in automation of configuration management, application deployment, and task automation.
While we encourage your efforts to automate everyday issues in a server or cloud setup, you can utilize Site24x7's observability and automation capabilities if you prefer to have us help you. Site24x7's server monitoring triggers instant alerts in the case of any suboptimal situation like:
In addition to instant alerts, Site24x7 can help you with autoremediation actions as well. Like running a command, executing a script, restarting a service or the server itself, the monitoring platform also brings automation to your aid.
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