Self-Healing Auto-Remediation in the World of Observability – InApps Technology 2022

There’s nothing like getting up at 3 a.m. to troubleshoot an incident across cloud services. You have to scramble to identify the scope, engage the right experts and remediate across clouds. Your company wants you to reduce mean time to recovery (MTTR), but do they understand the toil and time such an incident response takes?

Despite the proliferation of automation in the enterprise, incident response is still a painfully slow, manual process. Engineers end up taking a “digital duct tape” approach. This only extends MTTR and unwittingly exposes the business to more risk. Automating incident response can create a self-healing system — a nirvana for DevOps and SRE folks — lifting the remediation burden and speeding up MMTR. Let’s examine the current state of incident response and how it could work with auto-remediation.

Incident Response Hasn’t Kept Pace

Manual incident response just doesn’t make sense anymore. Speed, security, resilience and efficiency are top priorities for every business today. Automation is one key to achieving these goals. But incident response is still in the digital dark ages. The toil, cumbersome processes and complexity create unnecessary site downtime. Moreover, the longer your customers experience site downtime, the more this leads to attrition.

It also means engineers are spending too much time maintaining existing systems, which limits their availability for innovation. Manual processes are not repeatable, scalable or auditable. Additionally, many companies choose tools that have high code skill requirements, which further limits how easily platform teams can automate.

If you’re dealing with this today, this incident response process will look all too familiar:

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Note the toil, the need to wait for others to respond and the time it takes to update reports and make notifications. It all takes too much time.

What an Auto-Remediation Process Looks Like

When cloud teams first decide to automate incident response, they often take a DIY approach. However, this comes with the same disadvantages of manual toil, time-intensity and ad hoc, non-repeatable scripting. A unified, self-service automation platform democratizes the ability to create automation and integrates the varied tools and APIs already in use by your organization. A platform enables cloud teams to implement repeatable, consistent, auditable workflows, which is exactly what is needed to automate remediation.

So, what could your platform team be experiencing?

In a self-healing auto-remediation incident response system, an event triggers automated, well-documented and pre-tested healing procedures. Vulnerabilities are automatically detected, launching secure, auditable, orchestrated infrastructure actions across cloud environments, eliminating the need for you to respond. Even the notifications are automated. No more 3 a.m. troubleshooting!

Your team will experience:

• Faster MTTR.
• Reduced toil, which frees them to focus on new projects and innovation.
• Deployment rollbacks that happen automatically.
• Low-code workflows that are easy to create and are repeatable, scalable and auditable.
• Decreased risk for the business and customer experience.

A self-service automation platform makes automating incident response easy and creates peace of mind, knowing that whenever an event triggers an alert, the system will handle it. The business will reduce MTTR, increase uptime and be able to focus less on maintaining existing systems and more on developing new products.

Learn more about incident remediation at Puppetize Digital on Sept. 29-30. A free, virtual event, Puppetize Digital focuses on putting people at the center of automation.

Lead image via Pixabay.