Best Practice 11.5 – Automate reaction to failure

You can minimize the impact to service by automating the response to failure. Design automation to respond to failure, impaired capacity, or loss of connectivity. Ensure clear arbitration criteria are defined to avoid false positives.

Suggestion 11.5.1 – Evaluate your automation for application awareness

For automation solutions that protect an application, evaluate the impact on state – for example, connected user sessions, logon targets, data replication consistency, and data corruption risk.

Suggestion 11.5.2 – Evaluate the health check mechanisms that initiate automation

Health checks should be designed with controls to help ensure that automations are not started because of false positives.

Where possible, rely on the data plane over the control plane for resilience. The control plane is used to configure resources, and the data plane delivers services. Data planes typically have higher availability design goals than control planes and are usually less complex.