Standard : Automated Remediation Rate

Description

Automated Remediation Rate measures the percentage of production incidents or issues that are resolved automatically, without human intervention. It reflects your ability to recover quickly from known failure modes using automated scripts, runbooks, rollbacks, or self-healing capabilities.

This metric provides a strong signal of operational maturity, resilience engineering, and system reliability.

How to Use

What to Measure

  • Count of production incidents or anomalies resolved via automated action (e.g. auto-scaling, restart script, rollback).
  • Compare against the total number of production incidents in the same period.

Formula

Automated Remediation Rate = (Auto-resolved incidents / Total incidents) x 100

Instrumentation Tips

  • Log automated remediation triggers (e.g. script start, Lambda invocation, rollback event).
  • Use observability tools and incident management systems to track remediated vs manual events.
  • Classify remediation method during postmortems or incident resolution workflows.

Why It Matters

  • Resilience: Reduces MTTR and keeps systems healthy without human bottlenecks.
  • Scale: Allows teams to manage more systems with fewer interruptions.
  • Predictability: Consistent resolution processes reduce incident variance.
  • Cost and burnout: Reduces pager fatigue and operational overhead.

Best Practices

  • Identify repeatable remediation steps in postmortems and encode them.
  • Use runbook automation tools to formalise and standardise common fixes.
  • Combine alerting systems with automation triggers to close the loop.
  • Validate remediation effectiveness with observability checks.
  • Practice safe automation: test, sandbox, and add circuit breakers.

Common Pitfalls

  • Over-relying on automation without validation (e.g. masking underlying issues).
  • Lack of observability or confirmation after auto-remediation.
  • Failing to update remediation logic when systems evolve.
  • Underreporting manual remediation due to lack of incident tracking discipline.

Signals of Success

  • Increasing % of incidents remediated without human action.
  • Lower MTTR correlated with higher automation usage.
  • Engineers spend more time improving systems than firefighting.
  • Self-healing patterns are reused and refined across teams.
  • [[Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR)]]
  • [[Change Failure Rate]]
  • [[Mean Time to Detect (MTTD)]]
  • [[Runbook Automation Coverage]]