Why use event-driven automation?

As IT environments increase in scope and complexity, teams are employing event-handling solutions that can rapidly execute key IT actions with full end-to-end automation. Event-driven automation ensures a fast IT response—for example, faster Mean-Time-To-Resolution (MTTR) for outages—and does not require your team to take manual action.

The best event-driven automation solutions enable you to easily select ideal tasks to automate, then simply and flexibly apply automation to them. This enables you to build existing operational knowledge into automated decision-making and actions, so that you can efficiently perform repetitive tasks and deliver services faster, with far less effort.

What is Event-Driven Ansible?

Currently available as a developer preview, Event-Driven Ansible is a scalable, responsive automation solution that can process events containing discrete, actionable intelligence; determine the appropriate response to the event; then execute automated actions to address or remediate the event. While this tooling and content are in developer preview, we invite both the community and partners to provide feedback that helps us create the best possible capabilities and integrations for Event-Driven Ansible.

Using Event-Driven Ansible, you can not only keep a system in a desired state, but also automate time-consuming tasks for any IT domain. IT service management tasks—such as ticket enhancement, remediation, and user management—are ideal starting points, but Event-Driven Ansible is flexible enough to automate a variety of tasks across your IT environment. Event-Driven Ansible makes it easy to connect actionable analytics to automated IT actions, improving resilience and responsiveness, while freeing teams to focus on more valuable work.

Work smarter—automate IT actions with Event-Driven Ansible. 

How does Event-Driven Ansible work?

Event-Driven Ansible connects sources of events with corresponding actions via rules. Its decision-making capabilities receive the “event” and match it to the appropriate Ansible Rulebook. These Ansible Rulebooks define the source of the event and explain the action to take—in the form of “If-This-Then-That” instructions—when the event is encountered. Ansible Rulebooks map event conditions to an action, like running a playbook or directly executing a module.

Let’s consider an example. Your event source is watching network routers and discovers that a router is not responding—recognizing this as an event. Event-Driven Ansible receives this event and finds the corresponding Ansible Rulebook that indicates: when “no response” is encountered from this type of router, reset the router. Event-Driven Ansible triggers the instructions in the rulebook and the router is reset, restoring it to normal function. What’s more, this can happen at any time—even at 2 a.m. when the network engineer is asleep.

Partners play a key role

Customers need solutions that bring together their multi-vendor environments, and event-driven automation is no exception. Partners can use the Event-Driven Ansible developer preview to try the technology and start writing Ansible Content Collections that will make it easy for customers to work with our joint solution. Integrating event sources and documenting experiences via Ansible Rulebooks will enable partners to work within Event-Driven Ansible, but there are also other ways to work together. Learn more about partner opportunities in our blog.

Smart, advanced IT through event-driven automation

With Event-Driven Ansible, you can: 

• Deliver more value with responsive IT services.
• Automate IT decision making.
• Leverage numerous sources of events. 
• Streamline and simplify IT workflows. 
• Improve security, ensure consistency, and reduce down time.
• Automate rote tasks to free your IT teams for high-value work.
• Respond with speed and efficiency at lower costs.

Event-Driven Ansible is built to provide an experience which is familiar to Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform users. In the next year, we will be integrating Event-Driven Ansible into Ansible Automation Platform as a component.

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