Managing actions

As a Service Delivery Engineer, you are interested in how the actions run and how to keep them running smoothly. Use the Actions page to test actions, view statistics, and administer the available actions.

The following types of runbook contain actions:

  • Semi-automated runbooks: runbooks that contain one or more actions. These runbooks consist of manual and automated steps.

  • Fully automated runbooks: runbooks that contain an action in each step. If fully automated runbooks are started by a trigger, you can find their status on the Activities page. Select the filter Type and select Triggered automatically.

On the Actions page, you can find all available actions with the following information displayed in the table:

  • Name:

    Name of the action.

  • Description:

    Description of the action.

  • Type:

    Actions are of the type SSH, HTTP, Client-side, Predefined, or Ansible, depending on the connection type used.

  • Invocations:

    The number of times the action has been used in runbooks.

  • Rating:

    Average rating, based on the ratings provided by operators and administrators who ran the action and provided a rating.

  • Success rate:

    How reliably did this action run so far? The success rate indicates how well an action ran.

  • Last modified:

    A timestamp of when the action was last modified.

  • Actions:

    As a Subject Matter Expert you can Test, Edit, Copy, and Delete an action unless the action is of type Predefined or Ansible.

    Select an action in the table to display the Preview side panel for that action. You can Edit Edit, Copy Copy, Test Test, and Delete Delete actions directly from the side panel. The Details section is open by default and displays the Description, Action ID, Prerequisites, Success rate, and Last modified by.

    The Parameters tab contains the name, description, and default values of the parameters contained in the action.

    The Content tab of the side panel shows the script content in the case of script actions, or the Method and API endpoint in the case of HTTP actions.

    Click the X in the top right corner to close the side panel.

How is the success rate of an action calculated?

An action can have the following exit states:

  • failed:

    The action failed to complete, either because it could not even be started, for example because of an invalid hostname, unsuccessful authentication, or incorrect parameters (in the case of an Ansible action), or it failed during execution because of an internal issue such as a zone failure.

  • unsuccessful:

    The action could be started but has a return code indicating an error, for example for ssh actions the exit code is not 0, for http actions the http return code is >= 400.

  • successful:

    The action could be started and has a return code indicating success, for example for ssh actions the exit code is 0, for http actions the http return code is <400.

The success rate indicates the quality of an action. For example, for ssh actions it indicates the quality of the corresponding scripts. For Ansible actions, the success rate indicates the quality of the corresponding Ansible playbooks.

It does not indicate if the configuration is correct. For example, if an ssh action cannot be executed because of an invalid hostname or authentication failure, you will see this in the success rate of the runbook, but not in the success rate of the action.

Therefore, the success rate is calculated using the number of unsuccessful and successful action activities. It does not include the number of failed action activities.

The total number of action invocations that is listed in the Actions table includes all action activities, including the failed ones.