Incident Response Automation: Balancing Efficiency and Human Judgment

Incident Automation: What to Automate, What to Leave to Humans

Dr. Samson Tanimawo outlines the strategic boundaries of incident response automation. Miscalculating the line between automated and human tasks can be more damaging than having no automation at all.

Why This Matters

In high-pressure outage scenarios, there is a technical tension between the speed of automation and the necessity of accountability. While automation can eliminate repetitive toil like context gathering and channel creation, applying it to judgment calls—such as failovers or severity levels—creates systemic risk by removing the human context required for business-critical decisions.

Key Insights

• Mechanical vs. Judgmental: Automate tasks with clear right answers and no downside (e.g., alert enrichment), but leave context-heavy tasks (e.g., impact assessment) to humans.
• The ‘30-Day Guardrail’: Known-good remediations should require human confirmation for the first 30 days before transitioning to full automation.
• Communication Scaffolding: Automation should handle the infrastructure of communication, such as auto-creating Slack channels and status page placeholders, while humans provide the actual detail.
• Measurement of Success: Automation is considered over-extended if resolution speed increases but engineers feel a loss of visibility or control.

Practical Applications

• Use Case: Automating alert enrichment by pulling recent deploys and service health data before a human responder is notified. Pitfall: Automating root cause analysis, which can mislead future responders if the bot’s conclusion is incorrect.
• Use Case: Auto-generating post-mortem templates using timelines pulled from chat and monitoring logs. Pitfall: Automating executive communication, which removes the necessary human accountability required by leadership.

References:

• https://dev.to/samson_tanimawo/incident-automation-what-to-automate-what-to-leave-to-humans-5f91