Assessment method of operational procedure for runbook automation

The large demand for cost reduction of system operation has made the shift to runbook automation essential, because runbook enables both the operational cost to be reduced and operational quality to be improved. Because of the reduction in the cost of automation development, it is important to assess the operation manuals in advance and to select the operational tasks to automate. In the assessment, the development volume of automatic operational procedure should ideally be estimated so that it corresponds to the contents of all operation manuals. However, there was a problem that the estimation was rough in the current assessment carried out manually by sampling research. Thus, we propose an assessment method that can estimate more accurately from all operation manuals by considering how the common procedures are integrated in the actual automation development. The proposed method was shown to be practical by comparing the estimated value of the development volume of an automatic operational procedure, calculated by applying the method to actual operation manuals, with the result value. Moreover, the proposed method enables to forecast beforehand whether operation tasks can be automated easily by calculating the payback period on the basis of the estimated development volume of automatic operational procedure.