What’s In Your Run Book?

Has anyone asked to see your Run Book lately? What do you have in it? Is it filled with manual operator procedures that could be automated?

This summer I’ve been writing a lot about best practices in various areas of automation. One question I always get is, "What’s a best practice for starting a job scheduling automation project?" My reply is, "Do you have a Run Book, or a set of procedures that your operators are following?"

An automated job scheduling project should dissect this book and break it up into manageable pieces that can be automated. When you look at the entire book, the number of processes it contains may intimidate you. So, pull it apart and look for ways to automate pieces of it without impacting the operator or your business.

Run Books often are filled with business and system processes. You can automate these procedures separately and decrease the size of the book. That’s a best practice for starting automated job scheduling.

Another issue I see is that some Run Books get larger over time because the team isn’t using the automation software they purchased. In the case of some of our customers, data center managers should periodically ask, “Why aren’t we using Robot/SCHEDULE to automate that?”

This last point is important: It’s easy to stray from automation and settle back into doing things manually. There still are a lot of people that believe you need eyes everywhere to track a system’s pulse and fulfill your SLAs. We agree—but it’s the “eyes” of Robot/SCHEDULE that work best for lights-out automation!