Efficiency plays a key role in all aspects of IT. It allows managed service providers (MSPs) and internal IT departments to provide the best possible service even with limited resources. Every MSP needs multi-functional technicians who can handle different IT tasks and cater to all customers. At the same time, MSPs also need the right tools that can maximize technician efficiency and improve service delivery.

When it comes to boosting technician efficiency, MSPs need to leverage automation in various functions as much as possible. By automating mundane tasks, technicians can free up their time and spend it on core tasks that matter. Auto-remediation is one such feature that could minimize the time spent on common IT issues and boost efficiency.

In this blog, we'll explore the different aspects of auto-remediation and how it could improve technician efficiency.

What Is Auto-Remediation?

Auto-remediation refers to a workflow that triggers and responds to alerts or events by executing actions that can prevent or fix the problem. Usually, when there is a policy violation or an issue, the technician handling the IT environment will get an alert in the RMM tool and must provide a solution as a remedy. Auto-remediation takes this a step further by automatically resolving the issue without the involvement of the technician.

To perform this correctly, the solution must be pre-configured in the RMM tool with the list of specific actions to be taken for specific issues. By configuring the specific actions, you can automatically fix common issues and preventing technicians from wasting their time on mundane tasks.

Auto-Remediation and Technician Efficiency

If your technicians are spending too much time fixing routine IT issues, they will have a hard time working on critical issues that need their immediate attention. By auto-remediating these common IT issues, you can free up your technicians' time significantly. MSPs that use this process in multiple accounts can boost the overall efficiency of their organizations.

You can also set up various levels of auto-remediation based on your requirements and convenience. You could start with auto-remediating basic notifications and then proceed to fully automated solutions as you get comfortable with the feature. When you combine auto-remediation with a mobile-first RMM tool, it becomes even more efficient, allowing technicians to monitor their IT systems and remediated processes from anywhere at anytime.

Benefits of Auto-Remediation

MSPs and internal IT departments can benefit greatly by incorporating automation workflows into their work process. Some of the key benefits are as follows:

• Time saving: With auto-remediation in place, technicians no longer need to waste time taking action for common IT issues. This can save a lot of their valuable time.
• High security: You can set auto-remediation to take immediate action for various vulnerabilities that could compromise your security.
• Cost saving: By reducing the manual involvement of technicians in routine tasks, you can divert their efforts towards more productive tasks and get more done with minimal resources. This can save you a lot of money.
• Consistency: Auto-remediation brings consistency to your workflows as you will have a clear picture of what actions are being taken under different circumstances.
• Avoid Alert fatigue: If you do not use auto-remediation and just rely on alerts there is a risk that critical alerts can be missed – or not seen in time - as they get lost in the general noise of multiple trivial alerts.

How Pulseway Can Help

With the release of Automation Workflows, Pulseway has brought auto-remediation to the Pulseway platform. This feature helps Pulseway customers put many common IT issues on autopilot and remediate them without any manual involvement. These workflows are fully customizable with unlimited routes, which means you can add any number of tasks to auto-remediate. You can also use custom fields in your workflow condition rules to create more robust execution paths. Most importantly, you can choose from 17 types of trigger variations while responding to specific types of problems.

This new feature is directly built-in into Pulseway's RMM and it is available to all Pulseway Team customers at no extra cost. It works as an extension of notifications and enables the platform to automatically provide fixes to IT issues. Technicians can get a glimpse of the real-time execution of various workflows and get the status of the previously executed workflows. With this feature, Pulseway helps technicians single-handedly manage the entire IT infrastructure of an organization.

Examples of Pulseway Automation Workflows in Action

Here are a few examples of how you can set up Automation Workflows to perform certain actions.

Example: High CPU

Notification: CPU usage over 90% (for last 5 minutes)

Auto-Remediation: Automatically kill the worker process so the web server restarts automatically

Why: The aim is to prevent an outage or downtime from affecting your business. If it runs at 100% CPU usage, it might run into a problem and prevent users from using the application. This can cause an outage or disruption to the business.

Example: Low Disk Space

Notification: System drive space is below 10%

Auto-Remediation: Run the maintenance task (Clean up temp files, defragment the drive, recycle IIS application pools)

Why: By getting notified that your disk space is low, and running a maintenance task to clear space, we prevent the application from crashing and interrupting your business or service.

Example: Patch Critical Servers

Run script 1: Exclude a server from a production environment

Run script 2: Install software updates

Run script 3: Include it again in the production environment

Why: Allows you to patch systems without causing any downtime to your customers. By excluding the server from a production environment, you can patch it without your users noticing any errors.

To Sum Up

Auto-remediation is a great feature to have for all MSPs and IT departments irrespective of their size. Your technicians handle multiple IT tasks and manage a wide range of endpoints. Wasting their time on routine tasks that could be automated certainly isn't ideal. It also makes it possible to maintain consistent service levels as a rapid, automated response to common issues is a major contributor to preventing system downtime.

By improving technician efficiency through auto-remediation, you can focus on profit-oriented tasks and boost your competitive advantage over other players in the market.