Running the IT operations of a company is no easy job. Not only do operations teams have to maintain all of the company’s systems, they also have to ensure positive user experiences, resolve incidents quickly, and help keep developers productive.
Luckily, there are ways to ease the burden on IT teams. In a webinar on ITOpsTimes.com, “Safely Delegate your Cloud Operations with Self-Service Automation,” Jesse Houldsworth, senior solutions consultant at PagerDuty, explained how self-service can be used to break down some of the barriers to entry to IT work.
According to Houldsworth, a lot of the skills needed to manage cloud services and infrastructure are highly technical and require specialized knowledge. He explained that while the folks managing those systems might know them inside out, there are other teams who might depend on those services that don’t have that expertise or training.
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“And this actually tends to happen quite frequently,” said Houldsworth. “There may be users in customer service that need to get some information about a specific customer, and let’s say the only way to retrieve that information is to query your infrastructure or a database running in the cloud. Maybe it’s an incident responder that needs to restart a service or redeploy a previous build to help resolve an incident or maybe they just need some logs so that they can triage or, or diagnose something that’s going wrong. Or, even if somebody has the right technical skills, let’s say I’m a developer that needs a snapshot of a database to reproduce some certain behavior, but I don’t have access to the environment where this database exists.”
These scenarios are examples of the bottlenecks that occur for these other groups in the organization. Houldsworth believes that the key to breaking down these bottlenecks is to provide these capabilities in a secure interface that can be used by anyone.
In order to set this up, Houldsworth advises IT teams to identify use cases and then work with domain experts to understand their workflows. Then that knowledge can be codified into self-service jobs.
Since Rundeck by PagerDuty provides these sorts of capabilities already, Houldsworth shared some advice for companies who would like to build this out. To learn best practices and tips, watch the free webinar on-demand now.
