Managing automations

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

The following types of runbook contain automations:
  • Semi-automated runbooks: runbooks that contain one or more automations. These runbooks consist of manual and automated steps.
  • Fully automated runbooks: runbooks that contain an automation in each step. If fully automated runbooks are started by a trigger, you can find their status on the Execution page. Select the filter Type and select Triggered automatically.
On the Automations page, you can find all available automations with the following information displayed in the table:
Name
Name of the automation.
Description
Description of the automation.
Type
Automations are either of the type Script, HTTP, Client-side, or Ansible®, depending on the connection type used.
Invocations
The number of times the automation has been used in runbooks.
Rating
Average rating, based on the ratings provided by operators and administrators who ran the automation and provided a rating.
Success rate
How reliably did this automation run so far? The success rate indicates how well an automation ran.
Last modified
A timestamp of when the automation was last modified.
Actions
As a Subject Matter Expert you can Preview, Test, Edit, Copy, and Delete an automation.

Select an automation in the table to display the Preview side panel for that automation. You can Edit, Copy, Test, and Delete automations 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 automation.

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

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

How is the success rate of an automation calculated?

An automation can have the following exit states:
  • failed - automation could not even be started, for example because of an invalid hostname, unsuccessful authentication, or incorrect parameters (in case of an Ansible automation).
  • unsuccessful - automation could be started but has a return code indicating an error, for example for ssh automations the exit code is not 0, for http automations the http return code is >= 400®.
  • successful - automation could be started and has a return code indicating success, for example for ssh automations the exit code is 0, for http automations the http return code is <400.

The success rate indicates the quality of an automation. For example, for ssh automations it indicates the quality of the corresponding scripts. For Ansible automations, 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 automation 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 automation.

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

The total number of automation invocations that is listed in the Automations table includes all automation executions, including the failed ones.