Guide to runbook automation: Examples, templates, and benefits

What are the basics of runbooks?

Runbooks provide step-by-step instructions on how to complete a specific task. They are generally used by IT departments and other related operations teams, but their principles can be applied to various business processes and functions. Runbooks started in paper format and later became digitized. The next step in runbook development is Collaborative Automation, which combines human judgment with automation to complete complex operations such as IT disaster and cyber recovery, cloud migration, and release management.

5 Common runbook components

Runbooks ought to be simple to navigate and understand. Generally, they include:

1. Task name and description 

Each task should have a clear and concise name or title that describes the action to be taken and/or its intended purpose. A brief description can also be included to provide further context. 

2. Task prerequisites 

Outline any prerequisites or conditions that must be met before the task can be executed - for example, if another task has to be completed before this one can be started. With collaborative automated runbooks, you can set up your runbook so that a task cannot be started unless certain requirements have been met. 

3. Task completion confirmation 

Cutover’s automated runbook technology includes an audit trail that automatically records when a task was completed and by whom, removing the need for manual post-event review. Additionally and where applicable, Cutover integrates with existing ticketing systems, facilitating the seamless opening and closing of tickets. 

4. Version history 

Keep track of different versions of the runbook and document any changes or updates made over time. This is particularly important in ensuring that the runbook remains up-to-date with changing systems or processes. 

5. Runbook linking

 It can be useful in some cases to create a structure of parent and child runbooks. For example, a parent runbook may be used to manage an IT disaster recovery as a whole and link to child runbooks for recovering each service.

What are the best practices for runbooks?

Creating a runbook involves a multi-step process that doesn’t necessarily end once the runbook is created. Rather, they require ongoing attention throughout their lifespan to ensure they remain relevant and up to date. Here are three best practices that pertain to a runbook’s full lifespan:

Conduct internal audits

These audits involve a systematic review of your existing runbooks to identify areas for improvement. Consider the following when conducting an internal audit:

• Schedule periodic reviews of your runbooks — quarterly or semi-annual reviews are common, but they should also be conducted whenever there is a major change within the organization in terms of technology or staff

• Involve members from relevant teams and departments in the audit process. Their expertise can help uncover areas for improvement while ensuring that the runbook remains relevant to all stakeholders.

• Check that all information coheres with current systems, ensuring that any outdated information or processes — whether relating to task descriptions, prerequisites, procedures, or other relevant information — are updated accordingly.

Test your runbooks 

A test and review process validates the effectiveness and accuracy of your runbooks. Testing ensures that the document’s instructions are practical, error-free, and capable of achieving the desired results. 

Consider the following two testing measures: rolebased testing and error simulations.

1. Role-based testing

This involves assigning specific roles and responsibilities to relevant stakeholders and having them follow the runbook’s instructions. This simulates real-world scenarios and helps you to identify any gaps or ambiguities in the runbook and understand realistic timeframes for runbook completion. Look to gather feedback from each team member on their experience with the runbook, highlight any concerns they may have encountered, and/or suggestions for improvement. 

2. Error simulations

These assess how well the runbook allows you to handle unexpected situations. Having the ability to dynamically alter your runbook during execution is key to responding to real-world scenarios like a cyber attack where you may be getting new information or have issues arise throughout.

What are the advantages of automated runbooks?

Take advantage of automation: Runbook automation can significantly enhance efficiency and reduce the potential for human error. 

1. Automated orchestration:

 When you use spreadsheets and standard project management tools, the burden of orchestrating all the moving parts during execution usually falls on a person. Not only is this a highly inefficient and error-prone way of working, it also takes that person away from being able to do valuable work elsewhere. Automated orchestration removes that burden and allows for a more efficient and smooth execution

2. Integrations to your existing automation tools:

You likely take advantage of the benefits of automation in many areas of your business but, for many organizations, these automated pieces are disjointed and there is inefficiency between these areas of automation. Being able to integrate the other tools you use for your disaster recovery, cloud migration, or implementation activities with your runbooks creates a central area of execution to bring all your automations together.

3. Automated audit trails for compliance and improvement: 

You can integrate your automation tools with Cutover via REST API. This not only simplifies the integration of Cutover with your existing tech stack but also enhances the flexibility and scalability of your runbooks. 

Three runbook examples

Here are three contexts for which collaborative automated runbooks can be used:

1. Major Incident management runbooks 

Major incident management runbooks help enterprises reduce mean time to resolution (MTTR) with a task-based model to incident resolution. Accelerate the mobilization of teams with automated communications to ensure the right responders are instantly pulled in, and gain visibility into incident status and tasks. Standardize repeatable processes with runbooks that facilitate seamless communication between technical teams and stakeholders without manual intervention.

Utilize AI agents for insights and recommendations to improve response and resolution time. By integrating directly with ITSM platforms, these runbooks ensure that every response is auditable and consistent, regardless of which team member is on call.

2. IT disaster recovery runbooks

IT disaster recovery runbooks are designed to provide step-by-step guidance for recovering from IT outages, cyber attacks, system failures, and more. An IT disaster recovery runbook will outline the steps to restore affected systems and services to normal operational conditions. This includes a clear view of task dependencies, resource allocation and timelines for each step, among other factors.

Runbook technology, like Cutover’s, works to improve and streamline the recovery process via real-time analytics, a clear and intuitive outline of relevant dependencies and prerequisites, and the integration of relevant software to recovery processes, as well as an automated audit trail for post-recovery audit and improvement.

3. Cloud migration runbooks

Cloud migration runbooks facilitate the smooth transitioning of on-premises applications, data and workloads to cloud-based platforms such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud Platform (GCP). These runbooks ensure a successful migration process by providing a structured approach to planning, executing, and monitoring the transition. 

4. Technology implementation runbooks

Lastly, technology implementation runbooks help in managing the deployment of new technologies, software updates, and patching. These runbooks are designed to minimize disruptions while safeguarding the integrity and functionality of existing systems. Technology implementation runbooks may entail the following components: planning and preparation, testing and validation, deployment procedures, monitoring and post-deployment activities, documentation and knowledge sharing, and communications factors. 

Runbook templates

Runbook templates enable faster response and better governance through standardization, efficiency and consistency. Runbook templates are predefined, yet bespoke documentation that provide a structured framework for performing operations. Organizations can tailor runbook templates to suit their unique needs and workflows. 

Best practises of runbooks

Before we consider the steps of constructing a runbook template — or what to look for in one — here are some key runbook best practices:

What are the 6 As of runbooks?

The ‘six A’s’ are often used to ensure a template is comprehensive — a commonly used framework for both formulation and re-evaluation. Your runbook template should be:

Actionable: 

Ensure that the runbook template facilitates clear and concise action points. Any user should be able to follow the step-by-step instructions provided to bring about the intended actions. Actionable instructions should be devoid of vague terminology but rather use precise and relevant language. 

Accessible: 

Runbooks should be readily accessible to all relevant stakeholders. This generally means storing the runbook template in a centralized location (preferably cloud-based) with the necessary security measures in place. 

Accurate:

A runbook template should reflect the most up-to-date processes and should be regularly reviewed and updated in light of changes to infrastructure or requirements. A runbook platform that provides comprehensive performance data also facilitates continuous improvement.

Authoritative: 

Runbooks should be built by subject matter experts.

Adaptive: 

Runbook templates should be malleable and able to adjust according to changing circumstances. Unexpected situations may arise during a recovery, migration or release, so the dynamic nature of collaborative automated runbooks is necessary to adapt to such changes.

Approval: 

Before any runbook template is made available to a wide set of users it needs to be approved and have a set expiration date. You can ensure highquality runbooks through regular reviews, through a create/review/approve workflow. With approved runbook templates you can ensure good governance by ensuring that users can only use best-practice templates.

What are the steps for creating a runbook template

The construction of a runbook template can be segmented into four stages:

Planning

In the context of an IT disaster recovery runbook, begin by clearly defining the operation and its scope — proper task definition often necessitates gaining a comprehensive understanding of your organization’s IT operations. Look to gain a holistic view of your IT infrastructure, considering the specifics at the application/service level. 

Consider incident reports to help identify recurring, common risks and prevalent concerns to each application. Document a response to those which are more critical for each application to ensure a more targeted and efficient recovery process, tailored to your organization’s specific needs and dependencies.

Upon identifying pain points and gaining a full scope of your IT infrastructure, look for any existing processes and/or past runbooks that aim to resolve the concern you intend to address in this new runbook. Oftentimes, there are established procedures that have been leaned on in the past to resolve the same or similar issues which often take the form of static documents or spreadsheets. Leveraging such resources can expedite the runbook process and better inform its contents. 

Building

In the building phase of the runbook, there are a handful of factors to consider:

Review the critical path and ensure task dependencies are correct.

Configure notifications to inform parties on both the runbook’s existence, its updates and for when an incident occurs that requires its use.

Set up your dashboards, recovery time objectives and other relevant factors that you intend to measure against.

Integrate existing tools in order for manual and automated steps to be in one centralized place

Provide the necessary permissions, allowing each of the relevant stakeholders access to the runbook’s centralized location.

Testing and approval

After you have built the runbook, test it with the relevant teams to ensure that the critical path and task dependencies are optimal. Similarly, gather feedback from users and stakeholders and make adjustments accordingly. Furthermore, conduct a run through of the tasks to validate the effectiveness of the runbook and that timings are correct.

Maintenance

Factor in both regular maintenance checks and ad-hoc updates in relation to technological, procedural, and/or organizational changes. At a minimum, your runbook should be updated every time there is a significant change to your application/service and reviewed annually.

The benefits of runbook automation

Collaboration between people and technology

One of the most significant advantages of automated runbooks is emerging where the role of people is valued, recognized, and incorporated into the process. Enterprises need to expand their automation processes, not to just execute repetitive tasks, but to include people’s judgment and awareness across the enterprise. The orchestration between humans and technology needs to be fully automated as some of the tasks require judgment and the interpretation of data, bringing people into the process where they can be most impactful. 

Runbook automation encompasses the orchestration of human and machine activities to give you a way of capturing the process end-to-end to ensure that things are done in the right order and that you have a complete data set. This makes for better processes that elevate the involvement of teams, can handle more volatility, and are more fault tolerant and therefore more resilient.

Improved incident recovery time

Runbook automation can be leveraged to automate the repetitive steps involved in recovering from unforeseen incidents. Whether this pertains to recovering an application or service after an unexpected power failure, or restoring data from a backup, runbook automation can help to reduce the time it takes to restore systems to their last known good state. 

Practically, consider a data center outage. Upon an external trigger indicating a system/application failure, automated runbooks can be configured to automatically start the server recovery process, which includes tasks such as checking hardware health and initiating Ansible provisioning scripts. In turn, the saved time via automation acts as a catalyst for reducing downtime and mitigating the costs associated with service disruptions. 

Improved regulatory compliance procedures

Regulatory compliance can be challenging when organizations are relying on manually compiled audit logs and have little visibility into what has happened and when during an event. Regulatory requirements are continuing to increase, creating a greater burden on these organizations.

An automated runbook platform can automatically record what steps were taken and by whom during recovery or release, providing an immutable source of data to use for regulatory reporting. This removes the need for teams to spend a lot of time and effort reconstructing what happened after an event from potentially unreliable or incomplete sources.

Improved efficiency

Runbook automation, by its very nature, enhances operational efficiency in the following ways: 

Time savings: When repetitive, time-sensitive, and error-prone tasks are automated, it frees up resources and, in turn, contributes toward organizational health. 

Scalability: Runbook automation scales seamlessly, accommodating increasing and varying workloads without requiring a corresponding increase in staff. 

Consistency: Automated runbooks help teams complete processes precisely according to predefined parameters and best practices. This consistency ensures uniform task execution, reducing variations and potential inconsistencies that may lead to further problems. 

Resource optimization: By removing the orchestration burden for managers, runbook automation frees people up to do more valuable tasks instead of being stuck on bridge calls or having to constantly manage communications. 

Prompt decision making: Via real-time insights and data, a runbook automation platform enables faster data-driven decision making, avoiding the need for people to make uninformed decisions that could create further problems. 

Enhanced visibility

Enhanced visibility touches on various domains: Task monitoring and tracking, audit trails, performance analytics, customizable reporting, and communication and collaboration, among other factors that drive efficiency and transparency within an organization.

An automated runbook platform enhances visibility through real-time dashboards and reporting that provide a centralized single-source-of-truth view of ongoing processes, their current statuses, and how progress is tracking against planned timings, helping stakeholders to make informed decisions. 

Cutover: Dynamic, automated runbooks

Cutover’s Collaborative Automation SaaS platform enables you to build automated runbooks and manage your application operations — covering IT disaster recovery, cyber recovery, cloud migration, release management, and technology implementation. With our automated runbook technology, you can:

1. Create standardization across your application operations with a centralized template repository to enable rapid mobilization spanning hundreds or thousands of applications
2. Visualize critical paths and gain real-time visibility and reporting into runbook execution
3. Meet regulatory compliance with the immutable and autogenerated audit log
4. Identify areas for process improvement with postexecution analytics
5. Extend the value of your existing technology by seamlessly integrating with third-party solutions and applications with the REST API

Orchestrating and automating your technology operations with Cutover enables you to reduce planning and execution time by upward of 50%, reduce audit preparation time by 60%, and enhance your organization’s overall agility and resistance in the face of operational challenges. 

Discover how Cutover’s Collaborative Automation runbooks can help your organization with major incident management, IT disaster and cyber recovery, cloud migration, release management and more. Book a demo today.