Levels of Automation - An Overview

A few months ago, I was lucky enough to be invited to speak at SolarWinds MSP's "Empowered MSP" conference in Orlando. While there, I spoke a bit about automation and wanted to expand here on one of the topics: Levels of Automation.

"Levels of Automation" are a way to define how much of a task is automated.

The 3 levels are:

1. No Automation: Where the full task is completed by a person with no assistance from a script.
2. Partially Automated: Where portions of the task or configurations are aided by things like profiles or templates, or tools are used to "push" software to things you want it on.
3. Fully Automated: Where you have designed rulesets to auto-detect devices, and everything is configured without human interaction.

There is a secret level 0 - in which you don't really even have a process/task to automate yet, just an idea - that will be discussed in a different post.

Understanding these levels is important for a couple of reasons:

1. The levels act as a life cycle of an automation project, where level 1 is where you really define the standard you are trying to automate, level 2 is when you are testing, and level 3 is full implementation of an automated solution.
2. The levels also relate nicely to specific types of tasks. For example, fully automated is a great goal for applying monitor and notifications and maintenance tasks. Over time, devices get added and removed, but once your monitoring is locked in and tuned for the environment, things like this are tremendously helpful.
3. The levels align with your relationship timeline with a client, where early on, like during an on-boarding, not everything can be fully automated as you still need to do testing and tuning. As the relationship grows and you are more dug into their network, you can crank up automation to a higher level.

Keeping these levels in mind as you select new projects to automate can help keep the tasks manageable and in achievable bite-sized pieces. You don't go from 1 to 3 in a single step - trying to do so would be daunting and discouraging for most people. So take it 1 step at a time.

Thanks for reading my overview of automation levels. Come back in the next few weeks and I'll have some examples that walk you thru some common automation tasks at each level so we can put this model to work.