5 ways Event-Driven Ansible automation helps you achieve more

Digital business relies on IT. As a result, IT staff must keep increasingly large and complex environments up and running at all times, often with limited budget and IT team sizes. The right IT automation solutions can help your teams manage IT environments with speed and efficiency, allowing time for more rewarding work and helping staff regain work-life balance.

Red Hat^® Ansible^® Automation Platform now includes event-driven automation capabilities. Event-Driven Ansible lets you respond in a predetermined way to observed events in your IT environment, without manual intervention. Simply define if-then rules, event sources, and automated actions in Ansible Rulebooks. The platform matches events received from third-party monitoring and observability tools to the appropriate rulebook and performs actions like system remediation, ticket logging, and even additional event generation.

Here are 5 ways you can use event-driven automation in Ansible Automation Platform to save time and effort during your work day.

Automatically identify and remediate potential issues before they impact operations and users. When system or network monitoring tools detect potential issues like performance degradation, configuration drift, or security vulnerabilities, Ansible Automation Platform can automatically resolve the issue before it causes a critical IT incident. System and network automation with Ansible helps operations perform management and maintenance tasks and respond rapidly when conditions change across a network.

Event-Driven Ansible is flexible from source to rule to action, so you can specify the exact level of response you need. For example, based on the type, location, and severity of the issue, along with your corporate IT policies, the platform can automatically shut down or remediate system or network components, log relevant data in an event or IT service management system, and open IT service tickets.

By proactively fixing potential issues, you can prevent many of the IT incidents and outages that result in after-hours and weekend calls.

Simplify and speed troubleshooting activities by automating initial response actions. Whether you use it for security automation, configuration, or other system automation, Event-Driven Ansible can reduce manual, error-prone remediation activities.

When an IT incident is reported either by a user through an IT service ticket or by infrastructure monitoring tools, Ansible Automation Platform can take immediate and appropriate action based on factors like the type and severity of the incident, the frequency of similar incidents, and established corporate policies. For example, it can gather configuration information and log files from impacted systems and add relevant information to the service ticket to help you find the issue faster and with less effort.

By automating initial troubleshooting actions, you can spend less time manually collecting information and focus on actually solving the issue to improve mean time to resolution (MTTR).

Respond automatically to user administration requests like recovering passwords or managing access. When a user submits an IT service ticket, Ansible Automation Platform can evaluate the request based on a variety of information—including the user’s role and request type—and determine if the request can be handled automatically in compliance with corporate policies. Based on the results, the platform can initiate the correct response, for example, resetting or recovering a password or granting access permissions.

Because Ansible Automation Platform takes care of these repetitive, unscheduled activities, you can focus on key priorities and strategic work with fewer interruptions.

Ansible Content Collections are a distribution format for Ansible Automation Platform content that can include playbooks, roles, modules, and plug-ins.

Sign in to your Red Hat account to download certified Ansible Content Collections.

Watch for configuration drift and automatically apply updates to maintain the expected states of your IT systems across your entire infrastructure. Ansible Automation Platform can review all infrastructure resources to make sure they are aligned to released configurations and policies, and update non-compliant resources using the latest information. You can also initiate event-driven actions like provisioning new resources from a service ticket to save time, effort, and costs.

By automating both scheduled and unplanned updates, and ensuring continuous compliance with corporate policies, you can reduce the need for after-hours and weekend update work.

Scale and tune your infrastructure automatically to meet user and application demand. Based on data—including network bandwidth and latency and processor and storage use—reported by your infrastructure monitoring tools, the currently available capacity, and corporate policies, Ansible Automation Platform can simplify infrastructure management. It can tune your systems in real time by adjusting allocated resources, scaling storage and processing, and reallocating network bandwidth.

Because Ansible Automation Platform handles the ongoing task of balancing infrastructure resources with user and application demand, you gain time during your work day to pursue more important—and interesting—activities.