What is Auto Remediation?
Auto Remediation refers to the automatic detection and resolution of incidents in IT systems without manual intervention. It bridges the gap between monitoring, alerting, and action by using scripts, tools, and services to recover from failures in real-time.
Purpose:
- Reduce mean time to recovery (MTTR)
- Minimize human errors
- Enhance system resilience and availability
Key Concepts:
- Self-healing systems
- Automated diagnostics
- Trigger-based response actions
Why Auto Remediation is Important
- Speed: Automated recovery happens faster than human intervention.
- Scalability: Supports growing infrastructure without scaling human effort.
- Consistency: Reduces variance in responses to issues.
- Availability: Increases uptime by preventing cascading failures.
Note: According to Google’s SRE book, eliminating toil through automation is one of the main tenets of reliability engineering.
Real-World Examples
1. AWS Lambda auto-restarts EC2 if CPU usage is 100% for 5 minutes.
2. Kubernetes automatically restarts a pod if it crashes.
3. Azure Automation shuts down unused VMs after hours.
4. Ansible script resolves disk space issues by cleaning logs.
Monitoring and Incident Detection
Prometheus Example:
group: instance-health
rules:
- alert: HighCPUUsage
expr: avg(rate(node_cpu_seconds_total{mode="user"}[5m])) by (instance) > 0.8
for: 2m
labels:
severity: critical
annotations:
summary: "High CPU usage on {{ $labels.instance }}"
Code language: JavaScript (javascript)
AWS CloudWatch Example:
- Set metric alarms on EC2
- Trigger SNS topic
- SNS calls Lambda function
Triggering Automated Responses
AWS Lambda Example:
import boto3
def lambda_handler(event, context):
ec2 = boto3.client('ec2')
ec2.reboot_instances(InstanceIds=['i-0abcd1234'])
Code language: JavaScript (javascript)
Azure Automation:
- Use PowerShell runbooks
Ansible + Rundeck:
ansible-playbook restart-service.yml
Code language: CSS (css)
StackStorm:
---
trigger:
type: core.st2.webhook
parameters:
url: /alert
action:
ref: my_pack.restart_service
Incident Management System Integration
Opsgenie:
- Auto-acknowledge alerts
- Execute scripts or trigger workflows
ServiceNow:
- Auto-create/change incidents based on events
- Trigger remediation flows via Flow Designer
Runbooks and Playbooks
Sample Playbook:
- name: Disk Cleanup
hosts: all
tasks:
- name: Clean up old logs
file:
path: "/var/log/app/*.log"
state: absent
Code language: JavaScript (javascript)
Runbook Steps:
- Identify log directory
- Clean if disk > 90%
- Notify Slack channel
Auto Healing Kubernetes Pods
Liveness & Readiness Probes:
livenessProbe:
httpGet:
path: /healthz
port: 8080
initialDelaySeconds: 5
periodSeconds: 10
Horizontal Pod Autoscaler (HPA):
apiVersion: autoscaling/v1
kind: HorizontalPodAutoscaler
spec:
minReplicas: 2
maxReplicas: 10
targetCPUUtilizationPercentage: 80
Auto Remediation with Terraform, Python, and Shell
Terraform + Lambda:
resource "aws_lambda_function" "reboot_ec2" {
filename = "reboot.zip"
handler = "reboot.lambda_handler"
runtime = "python3.9"
role = aws_iam_role.lambda_exec.arn
}
Code language: JavaScript (javascript)
Shell Script Example:
#!/bin/bash
if [ $(df / | awk 'NR==2 {print $5}' | sed 's/%//') -gt 90 ]; then
rm -rf /var/log/*
fi
Code language: JavaScript (javascript)
Real-World Architecture & Use Cases
Example: EC2 Auto Remediation
[CloudWatch] → [SNS] → [Lambda] → [EC2 Action]
Code language: CSS (css)
Example: Kubernetes Crash Recovery
[Prometheus] → [Alertmanager] → [Webhook] → [Script]
Code language: CSS (css)
Use Cases:
- App crash recovery
- DB failover
- Disk cleanup
- Restart services
Pros, Cons, and Risks
✅ Pros:
- Fast recovery
- 24/7 coverage
- Less toil
❌ Cons:
- Over-remediation
- False positives
⚠️ Risks:
- Remediation loops
- Dependency conflicts
- Security implications
Best Practices
- Always start with manual playbooks before automation.
- Implement rate limiting or cooldown periods.
- Use logging and observability.
- Add audit logs to track automatic actions.
- Simulate failures in test environments before production.
Sample Projects
Glossary
- MTTR: Mean Time to Recovery
- Runbook: A manual guide for resolving incidents
- Playbook: Automated form of a runbook
- Remediation Loop: Continuous triggering of remediation without resolution
- Liveness Probe: Health check for containers
FAQ
Q1: What if the script fails to remediate?
Add fallback or notify human on failure.
Q2: Can we disable auto-remediation?
Yes, use flags or feature toggles.
Q3: Is AI used in remediation?
Yes, in advanced systems like AIOps.
Quizzes
1. What does MTTR stand for?
- Mean Time to Recovery
- Manual Testing Through Regression
2. Which Kubernetes feature allows pod recovery?
- ConfigMap
- Liveness Probe
3. Which tool is NOT used for auto remediation?
- StackStorm
- Excel
End of Tutorial – Happy Automating!
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