Automation = Uniqueness

Last week we talked about management by exception and the importance of getting notified in a reasonable amount of time so that you can stay ahead of your users. That’s the first step if your team is responsible for a network of servers. The second step is automation.

To reach automation, you have to invest in technology that lets you enter rules that can act on exceptions. For example, Run this batch job after this file arrives, or End these subsystems before you run backups.

A lot of platforms need scripts to achieve rules. The Robot Automated Operations Solution lets you do it by filling in blanks on a display. Whether the interface is graphical or green screen, the important part is that you don’t have to be a programmer to automate.

That makes a huge difference in the amount of time required to implement automation. I love it when a salesperson says that you just need to write a script to automate. What they don’t tell you is that the feature isn’t really in their product—the product has external calls (hooks) to the script you wrote. With the Robot products, you can easily do things like suppress messages, or make them more important, so that your Operations team can automate without being expert coders.

I have always felt that if you can automate an exception, you should. Don’t have people responding to messages the same way every time; don’t run backups manually; don’t look for files on a server manually before running a job; don’t send data around the network manually; don’t check jobs manually as they run; don’t check resources manually for each shift; don’t convert spooled files to PDF manually; and so on.

I learned many years ago that automating by creating rules that work consistently is best. People make mistakes performing manual processes. With automation, IT audits are easier, SLAs are easier to achieve, and you work smarter, not harder. When you combine management by exception with proper escalation, lights-out automation can be your reality.