Monitoring, Governance, and Troubleshooting Automation
Monitoring, Governance, and Troubleshooting Automation tests whether you can prove automation is working and control its risk. Prism Central provides alerts, events, tasks, audit logs, and execution history; projects provide quotas, roles, and approvals.
Governance controls
- Use RBAC roles and project scoping to limit who can create, run, and approve automation.
- Quotas cap consumption per project; approvals gate high-impact actions.
- Audit logs and execution history provide accountability for playbooks, runbooks, and Calm actions.
Troubleshooting sequence
- Confirm the trigger fired and inspect its payload.
- Check scope: category, project, and alert filters.
- Verify credentials, endpoints, and connectivity.
- Read task-level logs, not just the overall run status.
- Check permissions and approval state before rerunning.
Worked example
A playbook that creates a ticket fails. Execution history shows the REST action returned HTTP 401. The endpoint URL is correct, so the credential is expired. After the credential is updated, a manual run succeeds. The audit log records the original failure, the credential change, and the successful rerun. Rerunning without reading the task error would have repeated the 401.
Traps
- Looking only at playbook status and missing the failed task.
- Rerunning without reading logs and repeating the same failure.
- Assuming a quota applies when the VM is outside the project category.
- Forgetting that an approval waiting state is not a failure.
- Ignoring audit evidence during a governance review.