Automating the creation of a runbook
A Cutover runbook is a set of procedures and instructions that offer teams a detailed, step-by-step guide for completing complex tasks and operations. Cutover runbooks can be created manually using the user interface. There are many cases where you may want to automatically create a runbook as a result of monitoring incidents or an application failure.
Solution
Let’s take a few common third party systems including ServiceNow, Jira or DataDog. ServiceNow is a market leading ITSM tool that allows the creation of change requests and incidents. Jira allows the creation of bugs and issues and DataDog allows us to monitor alerts such as outages and cyber attacks. The Cutover API can be leveraged in these third party applications to trigger the creation or the copy of a runbook. What does that look like? Let's take each of the examples above:
- ServiceNow can be used to automatically trigger the creation or copy a runbook from a newly created change request or incident.
- Jira automation rules can be used to trigger the creation or copy a runbook from a newly created bug or issue.
- DataDog has the ability to trigger the creation or copy a runbook to respond to outages and cyber attacks.
These are some of the examples of using the Cutover API to perform inbound actions from third party applications. Most modern day third party applications will allow you to leverage Rest API calls and this presents you with some great opportunities.
Here's how you can use the Cutover API in ServiceNow as demonstrated in the video below.
Recipe
Available endpoints
This is an example page showing how you can copy a runbook and start the runbook.
This endpoint outlines how to create a brand new runbook.
