Playbooks are nice. Results are better. This simple truth highlights a critical challenge in modern enterprises: while technical teams have mastered infrastructure automation with Ansible®, they need more than just technical playbooks that can only be used by SMEs—they need comprehensive automation that drives measurable business outcomes. Building cross-functional workflows streamlines operations across departments, significantly reducing manual overhead and accelerating efficiency in digital operations. 

Enter the powerful combination of Ansible and PagerDuty Runbook Automation (powered by Rundeck). Where Ansible excels at infrastructure automation, Runbook Automation serves as an enterprise wide automation orchestrator, enabling standardized, self-service execution of Ansible playbooks and beyond, across the organization. 

Overcoming automation roadblocks 

Today’s technical teams face three critical challenges that limit their automation potential:

1. Siloed automation: Automation use cases are built solely within technical teams or experts, limiting valuable opportunities to leverage shared data and resources. This creates inefficiencies and can massively slow down operations.
2. Technical barriers: Traditional automation benefits are limited to those with specialized expertise who know how to run a specific script or have certain access controls, etc. When only technical experts can create and manage automation, it creates bottlenecks and reduces the overall impact of automation investments.
3. Scale limitations: As organizations grow, traditional approaches struggle to meet enterprise-wide automation needs. Without a unified platform, scaling automation across teams and environments becomes increasingly complex and costly.

Three pillars of automation success

When organizations combine Ansible with Runbook Automation, they unlock three essential capabilities that transform how enterprises handle automation:

1. Unified automation platform: 

Leveraging Runbook Automation with Ansible creates a unified platform that orchestrates automation end-to-end. It serves as the single source of truth for all automation needs across the enterprise. By consolidating all automation–Ansible and beyond– into Runbook Automation, teams can efficiently manage and orchestrate processes while maintaining security and compliance. With access to 700+ integrations via the PagerDuty Operations Cloud platform, teams can connect Ansible automation with tools across their enterprise, from monitoring systems to ITSM platform. This approach delivers comprehensive automation that spans incident response, security and cloud operations – all while maintaining robust access controls and audit trails. 

2. Modern automation architecture

Legacy automation tools not only create scaling challenges with inconsistencies across environments but pose maintenance challenges that require significant overhead to maintain. While Ansible excels at infrastructure automation, organizations often struggle to maintain consistency when deploying playbooks across different environments. Modernize automation without these legacy limits with Runbook Automation’s modern architecture that enhances Ansible’s capabilities to provide standardized controls across different environments. Help to ensure standardized orchestration with less disruption of existing workflows and added complexity. Teams can easily run Ansible’s playbooks with Runbook Automation’s user-friendly GUI. While teams still need to maintain these playbooks, Runbook Automation acts as the orchestrator, streamlining the execution process and providing version control integrations. By combining Ansible’s infrastructure automation capabilities with Runbook Automation’s robust orchestration platform, organizations can scale their strategy without getting buried in maintenance overhead.

3. Democratized self-service

Teams need to move faster without being constrained by technical silos. The real power of automation comes from democratizing automation to more than just the technical experts. Due to Ansible’s technical complexity, non-technical teams struggle to execute playbooks independently, creating bottlenecks and forcing reliance on specialized engineers for routine automation tasks. Runbook Automation transforms Ansible from a tool for technical experts into a self-service platform that makes automation accessible for everyone.  Runbook Automation provides access control capabilities, and logging for projects and jobs, enabling teams with automation they can run safely without compromising security or compliance. Teams can delegate automation for stakeholders to safely execute via their preferred UX: web based, API, CLI, or via plug-ins into any other popular apps such as PagerDuty, ServiceNow, Slack, or Jira. Self-service automation  eliminates the service bottlenecks that arise when technical teams become gatekeepers for automation requests, streamlining operations with seamless integrations across environments.

The Power of Better Together

Runbook Automation creates a centralized platform that helps teams automate and orchestrate operations tasks. When integrated with Ansible, it creates a powerful combination that transforms how enterprises handle automation. The combination of the two means organizations can create automated workflows across different tools, extend automation beyond infrastructure to include event-driven automation and implement fine-grained access controls for safe delegation of automation tasks. It’s not a platform vs. platform, rather than understanding the synergy between both tools to deliver results that matter. 

Take the Next Step

Ready to transform your automation strategy? Start your free trial of Runbook Automation today or explore our Template and Prompt Library for pre-built examples and use-cases that can jumpstart your automation journey.