Overview
Event-driven automation is the process of running a predefined response to an issue or changing condition in an IT environment. That response could be to solve an immediate issue or to complete a management step every time a routine event takes place.
A common example of event-driven automation could be to execute a series of actions in response to an outage alert—logging a service ticket, capturing troubleshooting data, and performing a service restart, certificate renewal, or memory or capacity increase. An example of an automated management response could be to trigger a compliance or security scan once a new server is provisioned.
Event-driven automation benefits teams managing complex hybrid environments, who aim to deliver auto-remediation and self-healing infrastructure or wish to automate specific processes in order to save time. Event-driven automation is especially useful in the disciplines of site reliability engineering (SRE), platform engineering, and IT operations, which emphasize scalable and highly reliable services as well as speed of response.
A multimode IT automation strategy
Event-driven automation is 1 of 3 approaches that make up a multimode automation strategy:
- Task-driven (or deterministic) automation is the execution of predefined workflows as a way to save time and effort. This is the foundational concept on which other approaches to IT automation are built.
- Event-driven automation incorporates specific, real-time events as the trigger that runs a workflow.
- AI-driven automation incorporates even more information to make decisions about which automation playbook to execute when.
Event-driven automation provides the foundation for AIOps (AI for IT operations), an approach that applies AI techniques to large volumes of operational data to resolve incidents faster.
Observability and Event-Driven Ansible
What are events, and how do they relate to observability?
Let’s look more closely at what we mean by an “event.” In the context of IT automation, an event is any detectable occurrence that’s significant for managing infrastructure or delivering an IT service. Events can be changes of state in applications, hardware, software, cloud instances, or other technologies. Monitoring and observability tools help identify these changes.
Naturally, not all events are equally important. In a complex environment, responding to events can be challenging because the proper response can vary drastically depending on the conditions. An application's performance degradation could be a minor concern, or it might require a swift shutdown to contain a security risk.
Observability is one approach to help understand which events matter. Observability is the ability to understand and react to the state of an IT system or application. Observability uses outputs, logs, and performance metrics to proactively troubleshoot and optimize your systems and applications. In a sea of noise, observability tools can surface the significant events that require a fast and automated response.
When supported by observability tools, event-driven automation solutions can be flexible enough to specify the best course of action for a wide range of events.
What are the benefits of event-driven automation?
Organizations often begin with a foundation of task-driven automation by automating IT actions that are central to management and service delivery. While that can go a long way to increasing speed and reducing human error, there will still be events that require slow, manual troubleshooting and information gathering.
As the next step in automation, event-driven automation can help teams move from a reactive to a proactive approach to IT management. Solutions with event-handling capabilities extend the use of automation across domains, processes, and geographies.
Event-driven automation leads to a faster IT response—such as shorter mean-time-to-resolution (MTTR) for outages—and relieves teams of time-consuming manual work.
Event-driven automation can help IT teams:
- Solve minor problems before they become bigger issues.
- Complete repetitive tasks efficiently and deliver services faster.
- Minimize human errors with codified steps that run the same way every time.
- Reduce low-level tasks and use valuable resources for other priorities.
- Build existing operational knowledge into automated decision-making and actions.
- Empower IT domain experts to flexibly apply automation to key needs.
- Automate repetitive tasks for networking, edge, infrastructure, DevOps, security, and cloud.
- Perform Day 2 operations such as configuration management, security and compliance enforcement, edge device management, provisioning, tuning, scaling, and user management.
Event-driven automation use cases
Event-driven automation shines when applied to repetitive, mundane tasks that IT teams complete manually and frequently. Some common use cases include:
Ticket enrichment
A common issue in IT service management (ITSM) is that tickets don’t include enough information to support effective root cause analysis (RCA). Event-driven automation can run workflows that reach out to relevant systems, gather data, and update corresponding tickets with the detail needed for a more thorough RCA process.
Automated remediation
Often, the way to solve a specific type of issue is a repeatable series of steps. Event-driven automation connects the analytics or tickets that flag an issue to the automated steps that will resolve it. Teams can automate issue remediation based on known system-behavior patterns and react appropriately when a monitored system raises an alert.
Automated platform scaling
Application workloads and platforms rely on automated provisioning to ensure business continuity and reduce potential impact on customers. Rather than waiting for manual provisioning, IT teams can combine capacity and performance metrics with event-driven automation to automatically provision containers, cloud infrastructure, virtual machines, and other technologies. Event-driven automation can save time in application development, for example by automatically provisioning development and test environments, automatically triggering testing, or moving code from development to test and deploying to production when ready.
Risk mitigation
With event-driven automation, a security response can launch as soon as a risk is identified. For example, if a risk is identified on a firewall, an event-driven solution can immediately close down the firewall, redirect traffic, and create a service ticket, reducing the opportunity for exposure to a security breach. Event-driven automation can help ensure that a team can address outages quickly—but it can also proactively watch for signs that lead to outages, supporting IT resiliency.
Automated tuning and capacity management
Ongoing tuning and capacity management are necessary for many IT functions, such as managing web applications and monitoring storage pools. Event-driven automation can respond based on predetermined rules and trigger automatic adjustments. On systems with thousands of adjustments, the time savings adds up. By taking the manual steps out of this tuning process, the response is automated at any hour of the day. Teams can be more efficient and available to respond to other critical business needs when routine alerts and tasks are handled automatically.
Scaling
As with tuning, the manual toil of scaling to meet user demand can be time-consuming. A busy application needs near-constant storage, processing, and network bandwidth adjustments. An event-driven automation solution can handle much of that work, for example by monitoring buffer pools to automatically adjust sizes as limits are reached.
What is Event-Driven Ansible?
As part of Red Hat® Ansible® Automation Platform, Event-Driven Ansible provides a scalable, responsive automation solution that can process events that are significant to an IT environment. It allows IT teams to determine the appropriate response to a particular event, then executes automated actions to address or remediate the event.
Event-Driven Ansible is completely user-defined and flexible. You can use Event-Driven Ansible to define the specific alerts you want to address automatically, the specific conditions in rulebooks you’ll use to evaluate the alert, and the specific automation playbook you want to call to take action.
Event-Driven Ansible relies on 3 components as building blocks:
- Sources provide event data about conditions in your IT environment. These events are sent to Event-Driven Ansible via plug-ins, Apache Kafka, or webhooks.
- Rulebooks contain sets of rules and conditions that trigger an action. When conditions are met, the desired action is triggered.
- Actions typically call a job template or workflow template to take action. These work with the automation controller to perform tasks, such as completing a process or taking remediation steps.
Ansible Rulebooks, like Ansible Playbooks, are written in human-readable YAML format. Unlike playbooks, rulebooks use conditional rules to define when an event should trigger an action. Event-Driven Ansible monitors for events, recognizes when they happen, and automatically executes the appropriate action.
You can integrate Ansible Automation Platform with open source tools such as Prometheus Alertmanager, Apache Kafka, or third-party observability tools such as Splunk or LogicMonitor. You can choose from certified and validated ecosystem collections to more quickly deploy these automation integrations.
To help you start with event-driven automation, Red Hat offers a self-paced interactive demo in a preconfigured Ansible Automation Platform environment. You can learn by looking at examples of how even-driven automation works to deliver better IT end-user experiences.
How customers use Ansible Automation Platform
Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform customers have enhanced their IT automation strategies by using event-driven automation. Organizations worldwide benefit from Red Hat partnerships and the automation community, using Ansible Automation Platform to improve resilience, reduce manual effort, and embrace a culture of automation.
Mutua Madrileña
Mutua Madrileña, Spain’s leading insurer, has more than 60 platforms that its middleware department manages. The middleware team implemented Dynatrace for intelligent observability and Ansible Automation Platform to automate platform provisioning and accelerate incident resolution using event-driven automation. The Dynatrace intelligent engine uses AI to detect any unusual application activity or behavior and triggers an automated Event-Driven Ansible workflow to fix the issue. This standard, automated process can be replicated in any environment to speed time to market, reduce operating costs, and free up skilled workers to focus on more valuable activities.
Xylem
Global water technology leader Xylem needed to move past manual and time-consuming operational tasks, including provisioning its regional meter-reading app securely in a private datacenter. With Ansible Automation Platform and Event-Driven Ansible, teams now use playbooks to automate security scans, storage tasks, and more. As a result, engineers are more productive, workflows are standardized, and the company has repeatable playbooks to optimize more backend processes.
With Event-Driven Ansible controlling where, when, and how automation executes, almost anything is possible.
Why choose Red Hat for event-driven automation?
With its broad portfolio of open source technologies and extensive partner ecosystem, Red Hat provides automation solutions that work across environments and integrate with tools you already use.
To deliver Ansible Automation Platform to enterprise customers, Red Hat brings together more than 20 open source Ansible projects in a tested and trusted solution that includes governance capabilities. The open source model cultivates innovative new features, community-powered integrations, and frequent updates that improve reliability and security. As with all Red Hat products, users get the benefits of open source delivered with enterprise-level support.
Want some hands-on experience?
In this interactive, self-paced lab, you can learn how to use event-driven automation in Ansible Automation Platform. Through hands-on examples, you'll explore how it works and how you can apply it to your IT operational challenges.
Intro to Event-Driven Ansible for IT automation
Event-driven automation can help organizations achieve their innovation goals by automating routine and repetitive tasks that interfere with top priorities.
