Automate recipe operations, exception handling, monitoring, and recovery to improve operational uptime and increase business stakeholders' trust.

Overview

Business process automations and application integrations continue to deliver value and support business needs as long as they work seamlessly. However, automations that don't perform as expected or are unavailable for use due to downtime or other issues lead to diminishing returns for the business.

The Operations lever focuses on building various capabilities, processes, and controls to ensure the delivery of automation services without any issues. It should also provide standard operating procedures to manage problems when they do occur based on business priorities. Improving automation operations can help organizations predict and prevent unplanned outages and resolve issues with minimal service disruption.

Effective operations for an automation practice encompasses the following aspects:

Monitoring and Alerting

Monitoring automations and the supporting infrastructure components for any issues, changes, and exceptions help with early detection. The configurable notification mechanism ensures that the appropriate personnel are alerted with the required details to improve incident response time.

Automation Logging

Automation logs are fundamental for troubleshooting issues, detecting and addressing security incidents, and supporting root cause analysis for problem management. Typically, three types of automation logs are used in practice: audit logs, job logs, and user logs. Audit logs help with security and compliance-related issues. Job and user logs provide context about the transaction to help operation teams draw a meaningful conclusion without any other information about the workflow or the process. Refer to Automation Logging best practice to learn more.

Exception Handling and Recovery

Automation and integration can include several business applications and actions, any of which can result in unexpected behaviors such as invalid data, network outages, or even complete failures. Automated exception handlers can recover jobs from errors without manual intervention, thereby reducing the time spent addressing these errors.

Analytics and Reporting

While monitoring, logging, and exception handling help manage operational aspects for running automations, the goal should be to continuously improve the platform's stability and security by analyzing historical data and trends.

Refer to the Resiliency & Recovery best practices guide for additional consideration while designing operations guidelines. Additionally, consider using Workato’s Autonomous Operations Framework accelerator to address these issues by providing a standard solution for notifications, logging and automated recovery when errors are encountered.

In addition to the above, include Workato in your service continuity management plan to ensure timely communication regarding any outage to the end-users. Start by assessing end-to-end business processes powered by Workato and potentially impacted systems and users in case of an outage. It will help provide a plan to your support teams to manage and respond to the outage and help promptly restore the business operations to acceptable service levels. 
Finally, document standard operating procedures for routine platform operations and maintenance schedules for any infrastructure, such as Workato On-Premise Agent (OPA) upgrades.

A robust approach to managing automation operations leads to the following business benefits:

• Increased operational uptime to maximize the business value of automation.
• Reduced risk and improved compliance due to faster discovery and troubleshooting of business process issues.
• Improved stakeholders' trust in automation to scale adoption.
   

Resources

GEARS Assets