Comparison
RunbookvsToil automation
Runbook
the alert links to a page that tells the person on call what to check and what to do, at four in the morning.
Written procedure for diagnosing and mitigating a specific alert. It converts institutional knowledge into something a tired non-expert can execute. Runbooks rot faster than code because nothing fails when they go stale, so linking them from the alert is what keeps them honest.
Full entry →Toil automation
the twenty-minute manual thing you did every Tuesday for a year became a controller that does it without telling you.
Removing repetitive manual operational work by encoding it, whether as a script, a controller or a self-service action. The economics are the point: work that scales with the size of the fleet consumes the team's capacity for improvement, which is what makes it worth automating even when each instance is small. The precondition is that the manual procedure is written down and consistent, which is why the runbook usually comes first.
Full entry →