Your Runbook

Customer Managed Applies to customer-managed instances of Alation

Overview

As an Alation customer, you should have an admin runbook for Alation. This will enable your IT teams to effectively run your Alation installation. This document is an example of the type of information you will want to capture.

You can get a copy of this document in Microsoft Word format from the Alation Community.

System Architecture

  • Add a description of the architecture of your Alation environment

Example:

../../_images/CustomerSystemArchitectureExample.png

Information Access

  • List of people who have access to the Alation server

  • Steps to request access the Alation server

  • Steps to access the Alation server

Alation Components

System Build and Deploy

  • Description of your build and deployment environment, for example automation

Alation System Administration

New System Installation

  • Steps for installing a new system in your environment

Software Update

  • Steps to update Alation software in your environment
    • Include steps to access the Customer Portal, download the build, and transfer to the Alation server

    • Link to Alation help: Updating Alation

Backup

  • Description of Alation’s backups
  • Description of customer specific backups, for example VM Snapshots

Restore

  • Steps to restore an Alation backup in your environment
  • Steps to restore customer specific backups, for example VM Snapshots

High Availability Setup

  • Steps to set up Alation HA in your environment
  • Include customer-specific steps if you have additional processes

  • Failover steps in your environment

Customer-Specific Setup

  • Specific configuration steps for user authentication setup

  • HTTPS setup notes

  • Email setup notes

System Monitoring

  • Description of Alation monitoring options and how you use them in your environment
  • Description of customer-specific monitoring

  • Disk space monitoring processes in your environment

  • System expansion steps in your environment

Support Policies/SLAs

  • Description of internal issue reporting policies

  • Internal SLAs

  • Scheduled downtimes

  • Support ticket creation process

  • Shutdown notification process

Alation Reporting

  • Manual usage

  • License compliance reporting

Daily Checklist

Example:

  • Check monitoring logs

  • Check Alation logs

  • Check space

  • Check memory usage

  • Check job status

Event Responses

  • Step-by-step responses to events and issues

Disaster Recovery

  • Customer specific disaster recovery steps