As part of the “Automating the SDDC, Where do I start?” Session which Thomas Corfmat and I presented at VMworld we wanted to give some general Automation tips which can be used as best practices and guidelines to make sure you are thinking about the right things when automating your systems, we have 10 of these in total which will be posted on this blog in 10 separate blog posts, so lets get going with number 1.
Measure It
When starting out with automation it is key to measure the process as it stands at the moment, identify the current process and benchmark the metric, this may be the time it takes to provision and configure a VM or the time it takes to run some custom processes. Or maybe this is measured by the admin to machine ratio, can you manage more machines if you automate the management processes?
Once you have this information it will help you to work out which areas to automate first, maybe you would like to automate the parts of the process that takes the longest, this will give you the quickest bang for your buck and show progress to the key stakeholders quickly. Or maybe you want to get the smaller and often simpler tasks out of the way quickly so you can start to concentrate on the larger areas.
If you cant measure the process then it may be a bad area to start, maybe it wont return enough value for you to even measure the impact or time savings you will have by automating it.
More Automation tips
More tips from this series created by myself and Thomas Corfmat for a session at VMworld 2013 can be found below (updated as published), if you have a login for VMworld.com you can also watch the full session here.
Automation Tip 5 – Simplify, Don’t automate a broken process |
Automation Tip 6 – Automate incrementally |
Automation Tip 7 – Testing |
Automation Tip 8 – Documentation |
Automation Tip 9 – End to end automation |
Automation Tip 10 – Follow the “Automation Triangle” |
Pingback: Automation Tip 6–Automate Incrementally - Virtu-Al.Net
Pingback: Automation Tip 5 - Simplify, Don’t automate a broken process - Virtu-Al.Net
Pingback: Automation Tip 4–Select the right mix of people - Virtu-Al.Net
Pingback: Newsletter: December 15 | Notes from MWhite
Pingback: Automation Tip 3–Its all about people - Virtu-Al.Net
Pingback: Automation Tip 2–Find your standards - Virtu-Al.Net