Your needs evolve as your automation becomes bigger and more complex. If you’re using multiple automation and orchestration tools—home-grown, third-party, or open source—growing pains are to be expected. With easy content authoring, advanced orchestration logic, and built-in security and scalability, a centralized orchestration platform can move your automation forward.

Gauge your readiness for enterprise-scale orchestration. Ask yourself if any of the following statements ring true for you:

1. You spend too much time creating and maintaining content.

All your automation and integration must be coded. You don’t have a central place to design and debug your automation. You maintain a complex structure of scripts, configuration items, and dependencies that offer no easy versioning or maintenance.

2. You want to make automation more accessible by offering self-service options.

Reliance on scripting means non-developers have a high learning curve. A graphical low-code/no-code platform would make work easier and help overcome developer shortages. 

3. You need better control of your orchestration logic.

Creating extensive logic is not straightforward—sometimes it’s hard to program exactly what you want. Error-handling is a big challenge. Generic error messages and difficult-to-understand error logs make it hard to identify the root cause of issues. 

4. You don’t have support for all your systems.

Your code is platform-dependent, so code written for one OS doesn’t work on another. For example, support for Windows is minimal, which means you have to keep checking compatibility for new devices. 

5. Your automation lacks standardization.

Because scripts reflect the author’s style, enforcing code uniformity is difficult. You want to make code easier to understand and maintain for all—less tribal, more standardized. 

6. You’re looking for out-of-the-box security, scalability, and high availability.

It takes time to build and manage your own credentials and security protocols. You also have to develop and configure components for scaling and high availability. A tool with built-in RBAC and cluster architecture (to easily run and distribute workloads across sites) would simplify your job. 

7. Sometimes you need to run agent-based operations.

For highly secure environments—where agentless access and protocols are off-limits—you need to install agents on target servers. 

8. You don’t have secure, central reporting for your automation.

To see everything that happens in your environment, you need to connect to each system, access each log file, and collect all log files in a central place. What’s more, you don’t have built-in authentication and encryption for confidential information. That means you must ensure the sensitive data in your logs, such as usernames and passwords, is not exposed. 

9. Your licensing model doesn’t align with how you’re automating.

Node-based licensing is difficult to quantify when your automation doesn’t touch a node or does so only occasionally—for example, when you’re using your tool as an integrator or when your tool touches the cloud once and not again. You need flexibility for removing node restrictions, improving usage visibility, and paying only for what you use.

To learn more about enterprise-scale orchestration, visit the Operations Orchestration product page or download our latest e-book: Enterprise-Scale Orchestration—A Practitioner’s Guide. This e-book highlights orchestration use cases, triggers for adopting enterprise-scale orchestration, what makes a great orchestrator, best practice tips, and more.