Daisy Group The Journey to Automation By Yaseen Patel, Carrier Account Manager, Daisy Group Automation is core to everything we do on the Data Analytics team here at Daisy, but as with all other buzz words, ACTUALLY doing automation is a lot different to just saying you do automation. If you are just starting out on your automation journey it’s easy to get lost in all of the terminology, tools and trying to keep up with the unicorns, but my advice is keep it simple. On the Data Analytics team we try to automate everything, but in order to do that we introduce small pieces of automation in an iterative fashion, starting with the biggest pain point; the thing that wakes you up at 3am or the smallest increment that we can get in place as quickly as possible to solve annoying niggling issues. Once you have enough small increments of automation you will find that other pieces of automation start to fall into place a lot more quickly. Don’t try to automate everything immediately and don’t feel that your 5 line bash script is worthless because everyone else is doing Devops, Chatops and AI.
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The eco system around your automation is key and visibility is a must, so it’s really important that you log as much as possible and use a good log aggregator to be able to search all of your log data in one place such as Splunk or Elastic and alert on things that are relevant to you, there’s nothing worse than having a script run at 4am which makes a critical change and you’re not aware of it. Secondly introduce monitoring, whether it’s of your infrastructure, your applications or your services. Use off the shelf metrics such as load and latency and bake in your own metrics that make sense to your business and bring it all together into simple and meaningful dashboards using tools such as Grafana. If you’re a development house leverage good continuous integration tools such as Jenkins to automate your build process and when you are ready, go one step further and implement automated deployments. Leverage configuration management tools such as Puppet, Chef and Ansible and sprinkle in some Terraform along with Git to keep server builds consistent, defined in code and reproducible if the worst happens. Finally and most importantly introduce a good communication tool to your team, at Daisy we use Slack and have dedicated Slack channels for automation: so we know when something has happened or changed, and for emergencies: so we know when something has broken.
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About Daisy Group Daisy Group is a business communications and IT services provider. We help UK businesses build the digital foundations they need to thrive in the digital economy. By joining the dots between old and new technology – and across the converging worlds of IT, telecoms and cloud – we help to make underlying infrastructure simple, secure, reliable and invisible. Through our divisions, we serve both direct and indirect channels – whether it is an SMB, mid-market company, large enterprise, resellers or partners. We aim to listen, understand, deliver and support. In doing so, we work to ensure that our customers get the very best out of their technology and communications infrastructure, helping them to achieve their goals. We are big enough to cope, yet small enough to care. And with the expertise and agility to build and support bespoke solutions optimised for businesses of every size.