Essential Guide

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Editor's note

Infrastructure automation tools and processes save systems administrators and IT managers time on rote tasks and remove chances for human error during IT configuration, patch management and performance tracking.

Automation without proper forethought, training and support, however, only makes a small mess bigger, and can do so quickly. And enterprise IT organizations rarely start fresh with no legacy code, programs, tool sets or infrastructure. These tips and examples show how to use workflow orchestration, automated alerts, configuration management tools and more to successfully automate the IT infrastructure.

1Tools for configuration, change management

IT automation must start with strategy and a deep understanding of process, which will inform tool choices. Modern organizations are taking advantage of configuration management tools to automate infrastructure updates and scaling. Pair configuration management and infrastructure automation tools with a solid change management system, and your systems administrators might get an entire holiday off without worrying about alert calls.

2Manage and monitor IT environments

Stability, security and efficiency are the hallmarks of enterprise IT production environments. Increased agility and automation continue from the development and deployment phases into production, with infrastructure monitoring tools and ops-centric automation.