Enhancing otherwise manual runbooks with automations is an excellent way to increase the productivity of the Operations Team. One way (among others) is to leverage the Script Provider. It connects to the endpoint via SSH and executes any kind of script runnable on the target system. In this blog post we will introduce you to the concept.

Concept

In CEM you can use runbooks to manage a library of operational procedures. The main use cases for those runbooks are:

• Add a runbook to an incident
• Run a runbook based on a regular or ad-hoc situation
• Attach a runbook to an incoming Omnibus/Impact event

In order to increase efficiency of runbooks you can automate single steps or even whole runbooks. Several automation capabilities are available to do this. In this post, we will focus on the Script provider. An automation is a reusable component in the runbook ecosystem and can be added to as many runbooks as you like. Through parameters and parameter mappings you have the capability to call the script exactly the way you need and even calculate the correct parameters during the runbook execution.

Setup

When the Operator is stepping through the steps of a runbook, any step can contain an automation. In order to be able to run this automation on the desired target system, you need to add the CEM/RBA public SSH key to the keystore file of the system, so it can recognize and authenticate the request. If you want the target system to only use a certain ID, you can add it to the keystore file of those users.
We created a small PDF file for you, which contains a highlight description for easy-to-follow instructions and as a handy reference sheet:

2017-10-IBM-RBA-SSHAutomation.pdf