Improve Your Automation to Reduce Toil

By Mandi Walls

Elevator Pitch

Toil is a four-letter word. No one likes it, but it has to get done. You create some scripts for repetitive tasks for your team. That’s just the first step for tackling toil and reducing interruptions. Give everyone in your organization access to your expertise in a safe, auditable way with Rundeck.

Description

In the course of your day as an SRE, your knowledge and expertise are in high demand. You can’t do every task every person in your org needs from you without the help of comprehensive automation.

Automation can be tricky. Some systems aren’t built with automation in mind, but assume that a human being will be there to keep an eye on things and fix errors on the fly, and we can’t be everywhere when there’s too much to do.

Plus, you want to provide access to automation for the right folks and keep a record of when the tools were used.

In this talk, we’ll cover some things to keep in mind when you’re building out your automation library, characteristics of good automation, and give you a look at PagerDuty Rundeck, a platform that will help you share your expertise with other folks in your organization.

Build automation that works for you and gives you your time back!