What are the most critical IT operations tasks that benefit from automation?

For monitoring and alerts, one thing to automate is thresholds adjusted to seasonality and other parameters. This would entail a degree of machine learning and AIOps. A majority of the time spent for monitoring teams is adjusted thresholds, and often - the static thresholds aren't very effective. How many times have we not seen alerts that never get closed, ignored or simply remain open forever? With a good toolset and process, static thresholds that are reactive should be transitioned towards anomalous behavior analysis and dynamic thresholds/bounds adjusted for seasonality. Ultimately, saving SRE and monitoring teams big chunks of time and TOIL.

Automating IT operations tasks such as configuration management, patching, monitoring, backup, resource provisioning, security compliance, incident response, log management, and user provisioning brings efficiency, consistency, and enhanced reliability to the overall IT environment.

Automation revolutionizes critical IT tasks. Experts concur on these key areas: 1. Routine maintenance: Regular updates, backups, and patch management can be automated to reduce manual effort. 2. Incident response: Automated alerts and workflows enhance the speed and accuracy of addressing issues. 3. Resource scaling: Automation optimizes resource allocation based on demand, improving efficiency. 4. Security: Automated threat detection and response bolster defenses. 5. Compliance: Automation ensures consistent adherence to regulatory requirements. In summary, automation elevates IT operations across maintenance, incident response, resource management, security, and compliance.

Microsoft system Center Operations Manager (SCOM) is a jewel. Being able to plug in modules for on premises applications like SharePoint, Exchange, etc. is a blessing. The depth and breadth of the rules used to check health is astounding. At one point I counted over 120 specific rules focused on verifying SharePoint search service. Over a hundred rules! 1. Use what you can off the shelf. 2. Something is better than nothing. 3. Start small and build. Don't wait for the perfect solution to begin. 4. Begin by tuning the thresholds, then move on to orchestration (opening tickets,curing issues, and service desk integration).

This one is dear to my heart. The goal here is in the integration of patterns and governance into an easy-to-use provisioning process. This is easier said than done. First you have to have a solid process. Next you need to think about full lifecycle management & what metadata needs to be collected in order to properly provision, manage, renew (attest), & finally retire the objects. It's not enough to get something built. It is imperative to collect necessary metadata especially where the manufacturer does not provide within the out of the box process. Examples are lifecycle tracking fields such as department, owner, department code, charge code, data class, data owner, & any relevant configurations such as int./ext. & privacy requirements.

Lots of tools to get this done. Microsoft SCCM comes to mind but there are options. The one thing that can get overlooked here is agent health (see monitoring above). If you can't verify something approximating 100% agent health, then it doesn't matter how good the tool is and there will be holes in the compliance. Some agents such as SCCM used to rely on Windows Management Interface (WMI). WMI then a dependency and notoriously finicky. Making sure the dependencies as well as the agent is critical to complete coverage and performance. This typically calls for some type of 'health' script to ensure functionality.

Yes. When considering typical backup functions, there is additional requirement especially for cloud services, archiving. Typical business clients are like me when I was 5 years old, never wanting to clean my room. Getting people to dispose of data is virtually impossible. The overwhelming and paralyzing fear of deleting something useful drives them to keep everything, just on the remote chance it might needed it one day. In all fairness, who hasn't thrown something away lying about the house, only to need it the following week? The solution is archival storage. Take the unused, un-viewed data and move it to a low-cost storage. Microsoft 365 storage runs $0.20/GB/month while archival storage runs around $0.02 to $0.04/GB/month.