Automated Runbooks for Faster Incident Recovery

This blog post explores how automated runbooks can expedite your incident management process. You’ll learn how to implement runbook automation to reduce repetitive tasks and streamline operations.

What are Runbooks?

A runbook is a predefined set of instructions or procedures, typically executed manually by a system engineer. Imagine you’re upgrading a production application; a runbook would outline the documented steps involved. This can include procedures to initiate, stop, monitor, and troubleshoot the system.

Recent studies indicate that engineering teams dedicate roughly 80% of their time to incident triage. The rise of microservices has led to an exponential increase in codebase complexity. Managing and monitoring numerous microservice endpoints translates to a significant number of checkpoints and alerts. Consequently, outages can trigger a multitude of incidents, overwhelming engineering teams with operational tasks.

Automated and executable runbooks empower teams to establish auto-mitigation or remediation processes to address incidents. These runbooks should be triggered by events or logs, generating incidents for engineers only when necessary.

Types of Runbooks

Runbooks can be broadly categorized as:

• Procedural Runbooks: These are manual runbooks that require following technical documents and executing the steps outlined. A system engineer would leverage standard tools to access production systems and manually follow the procedure.
• Executable Runbooks: Similar to procedural runbooks, executable runbooks involve system engineers following a documented procedure. However, they can also execute an automation task on their machine (like a shell script, Powershell script, or any other scripts) on a designated system to fix the problem.
• Automated Runbooks: As the name implies, automated runbooks execute without human intervention.

This blog post focuses on automated runbooks and explores some automation tools.

Benefits of Automated Runbooks

Automated runbooks allow you to automate time-consuming and repetitive tasks. You can leverage them to automate various tasks across one or more servers.

Here are some examples where automated runbooks can potentially save the day:

• Active Directory: Update Active Directory accounts upon onboarding new users. Runbooks can streamline this process by creating user accounts and assigning them to relevant groups, ensuring they have appropriate permissions and are incorporated into the organizational domain. Additionally, you can integrate activities required for new employee onboarding. Automated runbooks can expedite these manual tasks and ensure a quicker onboarding experience for new hires.
• Virtual Machine/Service Management: Manage virtual machines (VMs) or services using automated runbooks. This can be beneficial in scenarios such as:
• Restarting VMs after patching
• Verifying service status
• Restarting services running on VMs following deployments

If you encounter VMs in a hung state or unable to serve traffic/requests, you can establish a quick-fix runbook to execute on the active incident to mitigate the issue.

• Log Archive: Automate log management by creating runbooks that can either delete old data or archive it into designated Azure log tables. You can then use these Azure log tables to analyze trends and identify patterns, such as the types of errors encountered by your web application server over the last 30 days. By analyzing this data, you can enhance the product’s reliability.
• Monitoring: Another use case involves monitoring. Runbooks can be used to monitor computer responsiveness, including aspects like host availability on the network, remaining disk space on the machine, health of daemons or services, and server resource utilization. Scripting languages can be leveraged to retrieve these details and update them on incidents or initiate investigations.
• Configuration Management: Deploying standard baseline configurations can be achieved using runbooks. These configurations can be related to services, clients, or network equipment, and can even be applied to mobile devices. This approach ensures adherence to a minimum security standard as defined by the organization’s security policy. You can also deploy OS and application configurations using runbooks. If software patching needs to be implemented, runbook automation can streamline the process.

Runbook Automation Tools

Here are a few popular runbook automation tools:

• Azure Automation: Microsoft’s cloud-hosted automation and configuration service, Azure Automation, delivers consistent management across Azure and non-Azure environments. It encompasses process automation, update management, and configuration features. Azure Automation empowers you with complete control during deployment, operations, and decommissioning of workloads and resources. It supports PowerShell Runbooks, PowerShell Graphical/Workflows, or Python Runbooks. You can trigger these runbooks from Azure Alerts, webhooks, schedules, Logic Apps, other runbooks, or watcher tasks.

For instance, you can create a PowerShell Runbook to restart web application servers. This PowerShell runbook can be scheduled as per your requirements and can also be triggered from webhooks or by a schedule.

• Rundeck: Rundeck lets you create jobs from existing scripts, run commands on selected nodes, or schedule jobs to run at a later time. In essence, Rundeck empowers you to automate routine or ad-hoc tasks by creating runbooks.

Here’s a summary of Rundeck’s features:

* Supports multi-step workflows
* Enables distributed command execution
* Offers job execution through ad-hoc requests or scheduling
* Provides a graphical web console for job execution and commands
* Includes a command-line interface (CLI) tool with a web API for operation from code
* Logs all command or job execution history for auditing purposes
* Integrates with various tools through several methods:
* Rundeck plugins developed in Java or shell script and installed on the Rundeck server
* External services utilized by a Rundeck plugin or the Rundeck core
* External plugins installed in another tool that interacts with Rundeck via its API

• Ansible: Ansible is a powerful open-source configuration management tool. It leverages playbooks to deploy, manage, and configure anything from a single server to multi-server environments. Similar to runbooks, playbooks define a set of procedures.

Ansible boasts the following features:

* Agentless: Unlike tools like Puppet or Chef, Ansible doesn't require any software or client/agent to manage your nodes.
* Python Supported: Built on Python, Ansible offers a multitude of Python features and modules. Installing Ansible often leads to automatic installation of Python on your servers.
* Secure SSH: Ansible utilizes secure shell (SSH) to connect to servers and execute operations. SSH is a password-less network authentication protocol, making Ansible both fast and secure compared to other options.
* Push Architecture: Ansible follows a push-based architecture for configuration deployment. Whenever you want to push a configuration, simply update the playbook and push it. Ansible takes care of the rest. In essence, the central server manages all configurations and pushes them to the designated target servers.
* YAML Playbooks: Ansible playbooks are written in YAML and define your configuration declaratively.

• Squadcast Runbooks: Squadcast Runbooks elevate your incident management with a next-generation reliability orchestration engine built on Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) principles. It’s designed to host and execute runbook automation in response to operational events or incidents. By leveraging Squadcast runbooks, you can eliminate repetitive tasks from your system.

Here’s an example: Imagine your Squadcast dashboard indicates your web application servers are consuming a high amount of resources, potentially due to high CPU usage or heavy traffic. To mitigate this, you can create an automation that checks if resource utilization on web application servers has increased and surpassed a specific threshold (e.g., 65%). To achieve this, you’d create a runbook in Squadcast and schedule it to execute on incident tickets automatically.

Runbooks Supported by Squadcast Runbooks include:

* Shell script
* Lua script
* Python3 script
* NodeJS script
* Ansible configuration

Best Practices for Runbooks

Here are some best practices to consider when creating runbooks:

• Know Your Application: Within your application, identify processes that require improvement. When defining processes that could benefit from runbook automation, begin by gathering requirements.
• Gather Requirements: While gathering requirements, focus on determining input and output values for your runbook, specifying whether they’re automatically supplied or require user input.
• Utilize Integration Packs: Integration packs provide additional runbook activities. For instance, if you want to automate user onboarding, which includes working with an Active Directory user account, you’ll need to register and deploy the integration pack for Active Directory.
• Single vs. Multiple Host Runbooks: Determine whether your automation runbook will execute for a single host or multiple hosts simultaneously. This decision will influence how you design your runbook.
• Runbook Execution Trigger: Establish how the runbook will be executed. Will it be scheduled? Will it run periodically or manually? Will it require any user interaction?
• Runbook Logs: Plan what logs will be generated upon runbook execution and where you’ll store them for future reference or debugging purposes.

How to Write a Runbook

A runbook essentially functions as a collection of procedures for addressing common issues. They can significantly enhance your team’s efficiency in dealing with these situations. Here are some general steps to consider while writing a runbook:

• Gain a comprehensive understanding of your systems architecture. Identify all processes, configurations, and dependencies.
• Brainstorm the most frequent issues that arise. What problems do you see people encountering repeatedly? What kind of information is required to resolve them?
• Create a flowchart or diagram outlining the steps involved in resolving each issue, from start to finish. This should illustrate the process from the initial encounter of the problem to its resolution and the user returning to normal operations. Include contact information for key personnel (like an incident lead) who can assist in maintaining operational systems and processes.
• Prior to deploying your runbooks, ensure they’ve been thoroughly tested. Store them in a central location where everyone who needs them can easily access them. Regularly review and update your runbooks to guarantee they remain current.

What Should a Runbook Include?

A runbook should encompass the following elements:

• Detailed, clear, and concise steps to address specific problems, such as system failures and security breaches.
• Information on who is on-call to resolve an incident, the resources available to them, and who can assist them in resolving the incident.
• The runbook may also include emergency contact information, procedures for data backup and recovery, and a list of critical systems with their dependencies.

Store runbooks in a central location where everyone who needs them can easily access them. Regularly review and update your runbooks to guarantee they remain current.

Difference Between Runbooks and SOPs

A runbook is a predefined set of technical steps, procedures, or documentation typically executed manually by a systems engineer. A runbook can encompass information related to application deployment, monitoring, and maintenance. On the other hand, SOPs (Standard Operating Procedures) are descriptions of the steps required to complete specific activities or tasks. They are used to ensure that industry rules and regulations are adhered to within an organization.

Playbooks vs. Runbooks

A runbook is a step-by-step procedure that helps ensure the technical aspects of an organization’s systems function smoothly. A playbook is more general, outlining an organization’s approach to a task and the responsibilities of its workers. While both a runbook and a playbook include information on technical aspects, a playbook will likely delve deeper into the cultural, compliance, or user experience aspects of a task.

Conclusion

By implementing a strategic combination of automation and process management, you can significantly enhance incident remediation procedures and ensure runbooks are updated in a timely manner. This guarantees that when an incident occurs in the future, the documentation is up-to-date and readily available to the right person at the right time.

Squadcast is an popular Pagerduty Alternatives Incident Management tool that’s purpose-built for SRE. Get rid of unwanted alerts, receive relevant notifications and integrate with popular ChatOps tools. Work in collaboration using virtual incident war rooms and use automation to eliminate toil.