Rundeck
Driving Ops Efficiency through Secure, Distributed Control

Companies globally are undergoing digital transformation using DevOps to operate in a more agile way and deliver smart services to their customers. With competition reaching a fever pitch to win a loyal customer base, they need efficient tools to ensure faster remediation of IT issues to deliver uninterrupted customer services. Rundeck—a PagerDuty company—offers a cutting-edge runbook automation platform that enables anyone to safely execute operational tasks that only subject matter experts could perform previously. Designed with Ops in mind, the platform leverages existing scripts and operational procedures to automate the workflows that span and invoke existing automation and manual command through a platform that can be accessed securely via a web GUI or API. Ops teams can emerge as the enablers of uninterrupted process execution and service delivery through the automation of critical business workflows.

At the core of Rundeck’s value proposition is its ability to delegate automation. In the event of an incident, instead of incurring the costs associated with escalating the incident to a subject matter expert, first responders can accurately diagnose an issue and solve the problem with the click of a button using standard operating procedures captured in Rundeck. Using runbook automation, companies experience fewer hand-offs and faster incident resolution, so they can avoid disruptive escalations and interruptions. “With shorter incidents and fewer escalations, engineering teams can focus on more value-added tasks and improve overall performance,” says Damon Edwards, Co-Founder of Rundeck.

Built with safety and compliance in mind, Rundeck doesn’t replace existing automation. Instead it makes existing automation, scripts, and commands more secure, auditable, and easy to run. Sensitive credentials, such as firewall passwords, can be restricted to qualified and trusted staff. In contrast, very limited use cases (such as a particular set of firewall changes for a particular product) can be made available to a larger audience.

Shorter incidents and fewer escalations are always welcome. With fewer interruptions engineers’ teams can focus on more value-added tasks and improve overall performance

Rundeck provides an easy way to integrate its platform into a client’s environment. The platform works harmoniously with the existing IT infrastructure to standardize the management of diverse technology stacks. Clients can decrease the overhead of repetitive toil and increase employee productivity by giving developers and other employees the ability to perform operational tasks safely.

In a case study, a global bank found it had optimized its processes for compliance and security but not speed and agility. Operating in diverse and highly regulated environments across 60 countries with over 1,000 applications in production, the bank faced great difficulty in enabling secure access to production infrastructure and applications for its technical teams spread worldwide. Unsatisfied with the status quo of how the bank managed operational tasks, a single engineer discovered Rundeck. Once in-house and running, other engineers saw the results and started creating standardized and shareable Rundeck jobs for manual tasks. By 2018, Rundeck was used for incident remediation in over 400 applications across the bank. The bank reduced TTR [Time to Repair] by 25 minutes per incident in apps where Rundeck was used.

To provide enhanced value to its growing clientele, Rundeck and PagerDuty have come together to automate the entire incident response lifecycle—from detection and diagnosis to recovery, remediation, through learning. This partnership is already bearing fruits as Rundeck’s clients are already seeing faster resolution time and fewer incidents.