Automation Savings Planner

Pre-plan your automation savings with Red Hat Insights for Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform

Enterprise organizations understand that to be leaders in their industries, they must change the way they deliver applications, improve their relationships with customers and gain competitive advantages. 

Positioning those advantages to have a positive return on investment starts with proper planning and automation.

But what does proper planning of your automation even look like?

For some enterprises, proper planning looks like reducing automation costs. For others, it’s reducing time spent to open new opportunities. 

With this in mind, Red Hat is excited to introduce Automation Savings Planner, a new enhancement that puts automation planning in the forefront within the hosted services on console.redhat.com.

The Automation Savings Planner is designed to provide easability to plan, track and analyze potential efficiency improvements and cost savings of your automation initiatives. 

 

How does it work?

Located within Red Hat Insights for Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, users can create an automation savings plan by defining how long and often the work is done manually, as well as a list of tasks needed to successfully automate this job.

Once defined, you can integrate your newly automated savings plans to automation controller’sjob templates to help accurately detect if the automation is successfully running across your infrastructure. You can also view projected cost and time savings from automating the job over time.

With these enhancements, you get a detailed overview on how to best optimize and prioritize the various automation jobs throughout your organization, based on time and money saved. This allows you to effectively decide what things are most important to automate first.

 

Ready to start saving? Let’s get started!

The first step is to create an automation savings plan that defines the tasks needed to complete an automation job. 

First in the side navigation of the Insights section, select the Savings Planner navigation item. Then, click on the blue button labeled Add plan.

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Within the Create new plan section, fill out the details for the task you want to automate. The questions include:

  • What do you want to automate? (e.g., Provision an Apache server)
  • What type of task is it? (e.g., Operating System)
  • A description of your automation plan
  • How long does the process take to complete manually? (e.g., 4 hours)
  • How many hosts do you plan to run the automation on? (e.g., 1)
  • How often do you plan to run the automation? (e.g., weekly)

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Once you’ve completed the Details section, select the blue Next button on the lower left pane of the window.

Within the Tasks section, list out all the tasks that are needed to complete this plan. Write out each task and select the (+) to add it to your Tasks list. 

For example, if we were looking to successfully install an Apache web server, we’d likely include tasks such as:

  • Install Apache package
  • Start HTTPD service
  • Enable HTTPD service
  • Enable firewall port 80
  • Configure VirtualHost
  • Secure Apache web server

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Once you’ve completed the Tasks section for your specific plan, select Next

NOTE: These tasks are for your planning purposes, and do not currently factor into the savings estimates provided by Insights for Ansible Automation Platform.

Lastly, within the Link template section, select the appropriate template to link to this plan and click Save

Once saved, you can view the newly created plan details. 

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In this Details view you will find a summary of all the options created and selected for your plan. 

If you notice something is amiss, you can easily make changes to your plan using the Edit button located at the bottom left corner of the Details section. 

 

And that’s it!

With this newly created plan we can use Automation Savings Planner to share a projection of how much time and money you could save by automating a specific job. Insights for Ansible Automation Platform takes data from the plan details and the associated job template to provide you with an accurate projection of your cost savings when you complete this savings plan.

 

Where can I find these stats?

Simply navigate to your Automation Savings Planner page, click on the name of an existing plan and navigate to the Statistics tab. You can also get to this screen by clicking the “Projected Savings” links in the card-based list of savings plans.

The statistics chart displays a projection of your monetary and time savings based on the information you provided when creating a savings plan. Primarily, the statistics chart subtracts the automated cost from the manual cost of executing the plan to provide the total resources saved through automation. The chart then displays this data by year to show you the cumulative benefits for automating the plan over time.

Click between Money and Time to view the different types of savings for automating the plan. An example is shown below.

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And there you have it! An end-to-end planning solution to optimize your automation best practices. 

By using Automation Savings Planner, enterprise organizations can gain competitive advantages and a positive return on their investments by automating key elements of their business. This not only saves time and money, but allows businesses to expand their automation capabilities to deliver applications, meet expectations and improve their relationships with their customers. 

Originally posted on Ansible Blog
Author: Roger Lopez

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