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IT operations automation refers to automating the daily, large-scale repetitive tasks in IT operations, transforming manual execution into automated operations. Automation is the sublimation of IT operations work. IT operations automation is not merely a maintenance process; it is a management improvement process, the highest level of IT operations, and the future development trend.
Problems with Traditional Operations Management
Currently, many enterprises have transitioned from manual maintenance to computer management for their IT operations, but through communications with clients, Yanchen Consulting has found that many of these enterprises’ IT operations management is still in a “semi-automated” state. This is because such IT operations still wait for IT failures to occur before operations personnel take corresponding remedial measures. These traditional passive, isolated, semi-automated IT operations management models often leave the IT department exhausted, primarily manifested in the following three aspects:
(1) Passive and Inefficient Operations Personnel
In the IT operations process, issues are discovered and handled only after events have occurred and impacted business. This passive “firefighting” not only keeps IT operations personnel busy all day but also makes it difficult to improve the quality of IT operations itself, resulting in low satisfaction with IT operations services from both the IT department and business departments. Currently, the vast majority of enterprise IT operations personnel spend most of their daily time and energy handling simple, repetitive problems. Moreover, due to imperfect fault warning mechanisms, issues are often dealt with only after faults occur or alarms are raised, leaving IT operations personnel frequently in a passive “firefighting” state. This not only yields half the results with double the effort but often leads to vicious chain reactions.
(2) Lack of an Efficient IT Operations Mechanism
Currently, many enterprises lack an automated operations management model in their IT operations management processes, and also lack clear role definitions and responsibility divisions. This makes it difficult to quickly and accurately find the root cause after a problem arises, unable to promptly locate the appropriate personnel for repair and handling. Alternatively, after a problem is found, there is a lack of a process-based fault handling mechanism, and when dealing with problems, not only are standardized solutions lacking, but comprehensive tracking records are also missing.
(3) Lack of Efficient IT Operations Technical Tools
As informatization construction deepens, enterprise IT systems become increasingly complex. A vast array of network devices, servers, middleware, and business systems makes it difficult for IT operations personnel to cope easily. Even working overtime for maintenance, deployment, and management often results in business interruptions due to equipment failures, severely affecting the normal operation of the enterprise. Part of the reason for these problems is the lack of IT operations technical tools such as event monitoring and diagnostic tools, because without the support of efficient technical tools, fault events are difficult to handle proactively and quickly.
IT Operations Automation is Imminent
Although technology for IT operations management is continuously advancing, in reality, many IT operations personnel have not truly been freed. The reason is that while current technology can obtain warning information from IT equipment, servers, network traffic, and even databases, thousands of warning messages piled up together make it even harder to determine the root cause of the problem. In addition, currently, the vast majority of update management work in many enterprises is done manually. Even a simple system change or update often requires operations personnel to log in to each device one by one for manual changes. When the number of devices reaches hundreds or thousands, the workload is imaginable. Such changes and inspection operations occur almost daily in IT operations, consuming a large amount of operations resources. Therefore, achieving automated operations management is imminent for enterprises.
Now, as the complexity and difficulty of IT operations management work greatly increase, relying solely on a few past “operations heroes” or “technical gurus” to handle everything is no longer feasible. Enterprises are beginning to need to use specialized, standardized, and process-oriented means to achieve automated management of operations work. Because through automated monitoring systems, potential fault hazards can be discovered promptly, proactively telling users which resources need attention to achieve prevention before problems occur. For example, round-the-clock automatic detection and timely alarm can achieve “24/7 unattended” IT operations, greatly reducing the workload of IT operations personnel. Moreover, automated diagnostics can minimize repair time and improve service quality. Therefore, for increasingly complex IT operations, transforming purely manual operations into a certain degree of automated management is an important development trend.
Firstly, IT operations process automation can improve process controllability, allowing personalized processes to be formulated based on business needs. This enables enterprise leaders to see their business processes, gain a deep analysis and understanding of enterprise processes, and then transform and optimize them.
Secondly, IT operations process automation can increase transparency. Because multiple versions may appear as business needs change, the opacity of manual processes will bring considerable difficulty to process customization and optimization. Automated processes allow users to see the operational status of each node of the entire process at a glance, and automation tools subtly enhance business assurance capabilities.
Furthermore, after the operations system implements automated monitoring, the automatic monitoring by tools reduces the workload on people, which is also a manifestation of cost reduction.
Specific Content of IT Operations Automation Management
IT operations have gone through more than a decade of ups and downs, and now it stands before us in a brand new posture — automation, which is the inevitable result of IT technology development. Now, the complexity of IT systems objectively requires IT operations to achieve digital and automated maintenance. The so-called automation of IT operations management refers to transforming the large number of repetitive tasks in daily IT operations (ranging from simple daily checks, configuration changes, and software installations to the organizational scheduling of entire change processes) from manual execution to automated operations, thereby reducing or even eliminating delays in operations, achieving “zero latency” IT operations.
Simply put, IT operations automation refers to linking events with IT processes based on a process-oriented framework. Once a monitored system experiences performance exceedance or downtime, it triggers related events and pre-defined processes, automatically initiating fault response and recovery mechanisms. The automation work platform can also help IT operations personnel complete daily repetitive tasks (such as backups, antivirus, etc.), improving IT operations efficiency. At the same time, IT operations automation also requires the ability to predict faults and alert before they occur, allowing IT operations personnel to eliminate faults before they happen, minimizing the resulting losses.
Tools for IT Operations Automation
For enterprises, special attention should be paid to two types of automation tools: one is IT operations monitoring and diagnostic optimization tools; the other is operations process automation tools. These two types of tools are mainly applied to:
Monitoring automation, which refers to implementing active monitoring of important IT equipment, such as routers, switches, firewalls, etc.;
Configuration change detection automation, which means once IT equipment configuration parameters change, a change process is triggered and forwarded to relevant technical personnel for confirmation, assisting IT operations personnel in discovering and maintaining configurations through automatic detection;
Maintenance event reminder automation, which means through real-time monitoring of IT equipment and application activities, the system automatically initiates alarm and response mechanisms when abnormal events occur, notifying the relevant responsible person immediately;
System health check automation, which refers to periodically and automatically performing health patrol inspections on IT equipment hardware and application systems, cooperating with the IT operations team to implement system health checks and monitoring;
Maintenance report generation automation, which means periodically and automatically collecting and analyzing system logs, recording system operation status, and through periodic monitoring, analysis, and summarization, regularly providing analysis reports on IT operations availability, performance, and system resource utilization.
Edit this section: Steps to Establish Efficient IT Operations Automation Management
(1) Establish an Automated Operations Management Platform
The first step in building IT operations automation management is to establish an automated monitoring and management platform for IT operations. Use monitoring tools to implement constraints on user operation standards and real-time monitoring of IT resources, including servers, databases, middleware, storage and backup, networks, security, computer rooms, business applications, and clients. Through the automatic monitoring management platform, achieve comprehensive processing and centralized management of faults or problems. For example, automatically trigger routine IT operations inspections within customized cycles to form inspection reports. This includes automatic operation and maintenance to complete tasks such as synchronized distribution and upgrading of system patches, data backup, and virus scanning and killing.
(2) Establish Automatic Fault Event Triggering Processes to Improve Fault Handling Efficiency
All IT equipment must automatically alarm when encountering problems. Whether the alarm is from the system automatically or a fault reported by users, it should be displayed in red on the operations screen. Then IT operations personnel only need to follow the data in the relevant knowledge base step by step. Therefore, enterprises need to establish automatic work-order-based process management in advance. When equipment or software experiences anomalies or exceeds warning indicators, it will trigger related events and simultaneously trigger the related work order processing flow to the relevant IT operations personnel. IT operations personnel must complete the specified links and work within the designated time to improve the efficiency of IT operations problem response.
(3) Establish Standardized Event Tracking Processes to Strengthen Operations Execution
When building IT operations automation management, it is first necessary to establish fault and event handling tracking processes, using table tools etc. to record faults and their handling situations, to establish operations logs, and periodically review them to identify and discover clues and root causes of problems. In fact, many practices have proven that establishing standardized handling and tracking guides for each type of event can reduce the arbitrariness of IT operations and strengthen the enforcement of operations, significantly reducing the probability of fault occurrence. At the same time, users should also be able to track the processing status of fault requests at any time through self-service desks, telephone service desks, etc.
(4) Set Up Key IT Operations Processes and Introduce Priority Handling Principles
Setting up key IT operations processes and introducing priority handling principles means requiring the CIO to define each key process of IT operations, not just what the process is, but also pointing out what impact and significance each key process has on the enterprise. At the same time, when setting up automated processes, it is also necessary to introduce priority handling principles, where routine matters are handled conventionally, and special events are handled according to priority order, i.e., classifying events into routine events and exceptional key events.
Thoughts Brought by Change
When change occurs, if one cannot actively respond to the change, imbalance will inevitably occur, and the consequence of imbalance is the collapse of informatization construction. The development of technology has brought new demands for IT operations. What relevant service providers need to do is find theoretical methods and technical means to respond to changing demands. What users’ informatization managers need to do is find reasonable solutions and quickly deploy and implement them.
In fact, whether users or IT operations service providers, the core goal they seek is consistent, which is to integrate and centrally manage dispersed IT resources. The difference is that IT operations service providers are the technical providers of solutions, and users are the users of the solutions.
For unified integrated management, what aspects need to be integrated? Through what means is unified management carried out? For these questions, H3C’s iMC 2.0 data center management solution provides good reference points.
To achieve unified integrated management, the problems that need to be solved can be divided into four directions:
1. Integrated infrastructure management;
2. Intelligent automation management;
3. Comprehensive security control strategies;
4. Open IT management architecture.
Integrated infrastructure management includes:
1. Unified network management platform. Real-time monitoring of massive network and server nodes through a unified network management platform, achieving accurate fault and fault alarms and precise positioning through effective threshold settings.
2. Virtual network management. Combining virtual networks with physical topology maps to dynamically display changes and migrations of virtual networks and virtual machines, transforming originally abstract virtual machines and virtual networks into tangible management, helping users solve virtualization management bottlenecks.
3. Server application management. Implement monitoring and management targeting the computing core, monitoring and managing the server hardware configuration itself as well as related operating systems and virtualization systems to ensure stable operation of the business computing core.
4. Business traffic analysis. Analyze network traffic and related data packets. On one hand, ensure the bandwidth stability of relevant businesses while measuring the demand for informatization resources by different businesses. On the other hand, the analysis of network traffic can also eliminate security risks.
Intelligent automation management should have the following characteristics:
1. Automatic migration of virtual resources. Server virtualization provides features such as VM migration, High Availability (HA), Fault Tolerance (FT), and Dynamic Resource Scheduler (DRS) to ensure the reliability and flexibility of VM systems. These features affect the physical deployment location of VMs, and VMs connecting to physical network devices require certain network resource configurations. The dynamic nature of their access location requires the physical network configuration to provide on-demand management capabilities; otherwise, the VM’s connectivity, security, and reliability requirements cannot be guaranteed. To achieve dynamic migration and on-demand action of network configurations, accurately locating the connection relationship between VMs and physical switches is a key capability. The emerging standard 802.1Qbg protocol not only ensures that all network traffic must be processed on the physical switch but also solves the positioning requirements for the connection relationship between VMs and switches through protocols such as EDCP/CDCP/VDP. On the other hand, the 1:N connection relationship between physical switch ports and VMs makes fine-grained control of network configuration for each VM very complex. H3C’s implementation of the 802.1Qbg solution provides better support for solving this problem by supporting the vPort concept on physical switches. iMC achieves automatic migration capabilities for network configurations in virtualized environments based on 802.1Qbg. At the same time, based on iMC’s integrated topology analysis capabilities for networks, servers, and VMs, it supports automatic migration capabilities for network configurations in vSwitch environments. First, define network resource types based on user application demands for network resources. Then assign this network resource type to different VMs, so that when VMs migrate or start, the corresponding network resources are automatically allocated in the network device.
2. “Zero Configuration” for Data Center Devices. The “zero configuration” mentioned here refers to the configuration relationship between related devices and the IT operations system. For enterprise users, there are many brands of internal informatization equipment, and the replacement and upgrading of related equipment are quite frequent. If the operations system needed to register the configuration for each device, the workload would be massive and tedious. iMC’s “zero configuration” refers to the IT operations system’s automatic recognition of related devices and automatic collection and capture of related monitoring data, thus saving the deployment time of the operations system and reducing the work cost for managers.
3. Automatic Orchestration of Network Services. In the cloud-era data center environment, we no longer face a static device environment. The infrastructure may continuously grow and adjust as business demands change. To shield the differences between different vendors and device models and allow IT administrators to focus on the service itself, it is necessary to achieve rapid provisioning of resources and business, realizing highly intelligent automated management.