Fully automating your daily operations is a moving target. No matter how great is your P&E team, they will always be one step behind.

Automating your processes come with a price: it will create new manual work to be automated.

That’s what runbooks are good for. For example, if you implement a log management solution like Splunk or Logstash, you’ve solved a large piece in your system infrastructure.

Beyond the indexes maintenance, you need to cover cases like running specific queries to verify a particular scheduled job. You could automate this, but in the meantime, you need to do it anyways, and you can’t wait until the automation is done.

Each new automation comes with a runbook that is not the third-pary official documentation; it is a specific document for your company’s operation.

Leo Celis