3 IT Workflow Automation Use Cases to Turbocharge Your Business

According to a recent survey by Gartner, business leaders anticipate a return to growth for their enterprises and industries in 2022, and a big part of their investment plans involve digital transformation. In fact, 20% of CEOs cited digital transformation as a priority for strategic investment. That is a significant shift from 2012 when Gartner found that only 2% of CEOs surveyed had made digital transformation a priority.

Perhaps it was the lessons learned in response to the pandemic when many enterprises found themselves unexpectedly reliant on their IT infrastructure to support new ways of doing business. But it is clear that digital transformation is a launchpad for business growth, with tools like artificial intelligence and automation enabling greater efficiency and productivity in a hyper-connected world.

Turbocharge Your Business with SL1

In the latest ScienceLogic webinar, “3 IT Workflow Automation Use Cases to Turbocharge Your Business,” we outline three examples of how SL1 PowerFlow enables you to automatically connect your IT systems and platforms.

The webinar features Gary Slebrch, Director of Enterprise IT, General Dynamics Information Technology (GDIT), Nagender Vedula, VP of Product Management and Engineering, ScienceLogic, and Ben Leyland, Principal Product Manager, ScienceLogic. They discuss insights gained from experience deploying our AIOps platform and PowerFlow, with a number of key takeaways for webinar attendees, including:

• How SL1 bridges processes and data flows across your ecosystem;
• How to use Restorepoint – a ScienceLogic company—to automate ticketing, troubleshooting, and remediation workflows when network configuration issues occur;
• How GDIT leveraged PowerFlow to automate workflows within their datacenter; and,
• How you can initiate and manage workflow notifications with SL1 and PagerDuty.

Automation Is the Key to Reliability

There’s no denying that today’s enterprises need efficient, reliable IT infrastructure to succeed in a competitive, global economy. Gartner says that by the year 2024, 30% of IT operational environments and IT shops will use automated insights to drive business decisions. The ScienceLogic SL1 platform, along with PowerFlow automations, supports that model of business by using an organization’s data to extract insights from the systems and devices that constitute IT infrastructure. Those insights can be applied to reduce the burden of repetitive and tedious tasks on IT staff through automated processes and decision-making.

SL1 bridges process and data flows across the IT ecosystem through an approach we describe as See, Contextualize, Act. In each use case discussed in the webinar—and every application of the SL1—the See, Contextualize, Act approach demands comprehensive device and service discovery, and the collection of detailed data and dataflows from and between every configuration item (CI). From there, the data is cleaned and formatted into a single operational data lake that is populated with accurate and timely data about the enterprise’s IT operations. That data forms the basis by which decisions are made and actions are taken, including the automations that ensure your IT infrastructure is operating at maximal efficiency. Use cases discussed in the webinar are outlined below.

Three Automation Case Studies

Use Case One: Network Configuration Troubleshooting and Remediation

With the acquisition and integration of Restorepoint, ScienceLogic strengthened its capabilities in network configuration monitoring and management through network configuration backup, recovery, compliance analysis, and change management automations. The panel discusses how this capacity supports the acceleration of the troubleshooting process when issues occur, so you can remediate those issues faster.

There are two main parts to this integration. First, devices are automatically onboarded in Restorepoint when they’re discovered in SL1. Second, when SL1 detects an event on a device, that event is automatically enriched with relevant data from the Restorepoint system. This is supported through the use of PowerFlow to automate the synchronization of elements between systems and SL1 when events are triggered.

Use Case Two: IT Workflow Automation

Told within the context of GDIT, a defense industry IT integrator supporting the civilian defense and intelligence agencies of the U.S. government. In that demanding environment, workflow automation is key to maintaining infrastructure health, availability, and reliability. Slebrch describes his experience maintaining agency data centers by taking a “crawl, walk, run” approach that starts by achieving tight integration between SL1 PowerFlow and IT service management (ITSM) tools like ServiceNow, Ansible, and ensuring an accurate, up-to-date CMDB, affording a 360-degree view of IT operations.

With the foundations in place, GDIT begins by focusing on automating incident response and remediation and then building to more sophisticated processes, all of which help their organization maintain smooth operations while allowing skilled IT staff to focus on higher-level actions that add value to the agencies involved.

Use Case Three: Notification Systems

Synchronization and automation of event notifications is a key element of achieving fast incident remediation and restoration of services. SL1’s out-of-the-box incident management integration with PagerDuty supports achieves this goal with both event generation and the change of state between two affected systems through bi-directional synchronization and acknowledgment of event resolution.

Our support of PagerDuty minimizes the number of manual steps required to synchronize user actions across multiple systems. For example, when an event occurs in SL1, the relevant details are sent to PagerDuty, automatically generating an incident on that platform, including information like event severity, the affected device, other data relevant to notice, and appropriate response.

For more detailed information about how ScienceLogic SL1 can play a role in the growth and success of your enterprise, tune in to the full webinar, “3 IT Workflow Automation Use Cases to Turbocharge Your Business,” and get the full story.