Automation for your everyday server issues

Managing a self-hosted server is easy. But when it comes to an enterprise setup with thousands of servers, manual intervention is a herculean task. The time taken for manual remediation is detrimental to the IT infrastructure. With the world running towards a zero downtime goal, every second in the mean time to repair (MTTR) matters. How do enterprises maintain low MTTR? With automation.

Automation used to be the buzz word before AI took over. Every issue was met with a question, "can we automate the solution?" and rightly so. Automation is the quick-fix to most of the problems and it gives breathing time while your sysadmins and SREs fixed the root cause.

Now that many organizations have moved to AI, you may wonder if it still makes sense to use automation. Automation is still your trusty solution to patch your IT facets without over-complicating things.

Where should you fit automation in your server racks?

In short, wherever beneficial. Let us see what those beneficial aspects are.

• Resource monitoring
• Patch management
• Backups
• Service/process monitoring
• Log management
• Scaling and balancing

Resource monitoring

Servers are sophisticated machines running on the simple logic: keep the server resources healthy and your IT infrastructure will be healthy. An unresponsive server can be a result of any or all of these reasons:

• A overloaded CPU that cannot process the incoming request
• A network interface that is down
• Depleted RAM

To combat an unhealthy IT infrastructure, automate the monitoring of these four key server resources: CPU, memory, disk, and network. Alerts should automatically reach the directly responsible individuals (DRIs) via automation setup. In high-transaction environments, automate the alerts for intrinsic details like:

• Disk I/O
• Available disk space
• Network interfaces
• Processor queue length
• File availability
• Firewall status

Ideally, any spikes or anomalous patterns in these metrics should automatically reach you. This setup should be in place at the implementation phase itself; if not, the second best time is now.

Once the alerts reach the DRI, automation should already be working to resolve the problem. It can be a script that could delete the "temp" files and free up space, a command to restart the most resource-intensive process, or a runbook that is designed to kick-start the healing process.

Patch management

Automated patch management is a highly debated topic. Patches are rolled out when a vulnerability is detected. Chances are great that the vulnerability has been exploited for a while and before the patch was issued. By the time the patch has reached you, it is often too late. Staying up to date with patches is vital for your IT security.

While some decision makers want the latest GA patches available on their servers immediately, some professionals tend to analyze them first-hand and then deploy the patches. Either way, your IT infrastructure should have an automation pathway that deploys patches on all servers either automatically or at the instant a patch is approved.

Backup and recovery

The more valuable your business is, the more robust your backup and recovery mechanism should be. In the unfortunate event of a server becoming unresponsive, the backup image should be readily available. Usually, the image is applied manually, but with automation, the recovery process can start almost instantaneously. Your disaster recovery plan—in other words, the business continuity plan—should include automation wherever possible. Waiting for manual intervention is costly for several reasons.

Windows provides its own Windows backup service, and there are tools available for Linux. Even with automated backups, knowing these key details is essential:

• When was the last backup taken?
• Is the last backup too old?
• What are the versions of the last few backups that are available?
• Is there a workflow in place to automate the scheduled backups?

Service and application monitoring

Recently, users of a leading e-commerce website were able to access the website, look at the catalog, and add products to the catalog. The problem was they could not buy products, a clear indicator of a micro-service being down. Depending on your IT infrastructure, this type of problem could be in macro-elements like your content delivery network, load balancer, or with your server resources. Sometimes, it can be at a granular level, like a container, process, service, or application going down. When anything goes wrong, you should be aware of it instantly, so the remediation setup can address the appropriate service level. An exceptional automation setup also starts the remediation process in addition to just alerting users.

Log management

Logs don't lie, but only if they are managed properly. Log collection, analysis, and reporting should be automatic. Otherwise, your logs could reach the TB levels easily, and for the untrained eye, it could be just a mountain of fluff.

To understand better, what if one your server EventLog has entries 4625 and 4670—both of which can indicate a brute-force attack—but these entries are under thousands of lines in an EventLog file and hidden among the thousands of servers you have. Ask yourself these questions:

• Are the logs being collected regularly?
• If there are any issues caught in the log entry, and how will it reach you?
• Are the log files accessible when required?
• Is there anything you can do to make these logs better readable?

Automation can and should answer all these questions. Once the automated alerts are received, a dedicated remediation action should be triggered. The remediation action can be anything: simple command execution, API call, or a server restart.

Scaling and load balancing

In earlier days, here is how the timeline of scaling up often happened.

• Business provisions multiple servers to handle an operation.
• Business traffic increases, and the servers struggle.
• Servers cannot handle the load, and customers start seeing error messages.
• Customers raise complaints, and sysadmins look at the server utilization.
• More servers are commissioned.

With most businesses today, competition is fierce, so it's important to provide responses to customers and resolve operational issues promptly. Automatic scaling is often preferable for scaling up to improve the customer experience and address IT server performance concerns, and scaling down to identify expenses that can be reduced or eliminated to improve operational efficiency.

When your servers are being pushed to their limits, you should have servers to share their load with, also known as auto-scaling. If the servers are underutilized, they should be allocated to other applications that have better uses for them. A typical enterprise has around a thousand to ten thousand servers and virtual machines.

While the cloud infrastructure has handled this automatically, your on-premises servers have to be automated to scale and balance loads depending on inventory and usage.

Before you setup automation for your servers

These are the key steps to implement automation:

• Define: Based on your list of areas to automate, decide which areas to focus on and set clear goals. Is automation going to be simple scripts, or is it going to involve complex workflows to handle disaster recovery? Determine the answers to this question before you begin implementing automation.
• Develop: Customize and install automation tools. They can be either scripts or dedicated tools.
• Deploy: The automation tools should be compatible with your existing IT infrastructure. It's important to test the tools. Connect them to your databases, as well as other internal and third-party resources and tools, and applications.
• Improve: There will always be an area to improve. Keep track of the performance of your automation setup and improve it as and when needed.

What could possibly go wrong?

Automation is a sophisticated tool. If it is not configured properly, the damages can impact your resources. As an example, you can look at the Microsoft Azure outage in 2024 that was triggered by a cybersecurity attack. At the onset of the attack, the defense systems responded automatically and were generally effective in minimizing damage. But an error in the configuration or at the implementation level caused the defense system to amplify the impact of the attack rather than mitigate it. From this unfortunate incident, we learn that it's crucial to configure your automation setup cautiously.

Automation tools

Puppet: This tool automates the delivery and operation of software.

Ansible: Ansible playbooks help in automation of configuration management, application deployment, and task automation.

Site24x7 for automation

While we encourage your efforts to automate everyday issues in a server or cloud setup, you can utilize Site24x7's observability and automation capabilities if you prefer to have us help you. Site24x7's server monitoring triggers instant alerts in the case of any suboptimal situation like:

• CPU utilization that breached the safe level
• Memory utilization that is consistently high for a prolonged period
• Disk space that is dangerously low
• Application malfunctioning
• Service that hasn't started yet
• A port that should be closed is now open
• A critical log file that has not been updated for a while now
• A firewall that is down, and many more situations

In addition to instant alerts, Site24x7 can help you with autoremediation actions as well. Like running a command, executing a script, restarting a service or the server itself, the monitoring platform also brings automation to your aid.