Hyperautomation Technology

First off, Open Loop vs Closed Loop Automation - What is the Difference?

We make closed-loop automation software. The following video explains the difference between open (all current automation) and closed loop automation. Please view the demo for more details.

Definition: Open-loop automation is when an infrastructure is provisioned, deployed, and maintained without necessarily receiving feedback; and if feedback is received, an Open-loop will not take action on it, instead, it will require a human to look into it and take action; i.e. the loop is not only open, but it also REQUIRES HUMAN INTERVENTION to succeed. Closed-loop hyper automation, on the other hand, is when feedback is received and is taken into account for further action to be taken automatically by the controller WITHOUT ANY HUMAN INTERVENTION (other than the initial design of the automation logic itself, but not the task the said logic automates).

The Unique Benefits of Our Closed-Loop Hyper-Automation Modules

CLOSED-LOOP AUTOMATION FOR IT SERVICE MANAGEMENT: A (mostly) fun look at IT service tickets that fix themselves

CLOSED-LOOP AUTOMATION

for IT Service Management

A (mostly) fun look at tickets that fix themselves — quizzes, stats, dollars, zero 2 AM pages.

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🧠 POP QUIZ #1

What share of IT incident tickets get REOPENED because the original “fix” didn’t actually hold?

Tap an answer to reveal.

ANSWER

C.  ~32%

Roughly a third of resolved tickets bounce right back — automation stopped at “action taken” instead of “problem verified gone.” A closed loop checks its own work.

Two Kinds of “Automated”

Only one of them actually finishes the job.

OPEN-LOOP AUTOMATION

“Fire and forget”

  • Triggers an action, then walks away
  • Never checks whether the fix worked
  • One-way handoff: alert → ticket → human
  • Like a hamster on a wheel: motion, zero verified progress

CLOSED-LOOP AUTOMATION

“Sense, act, verify, confirm”

  • Senses the problem, takes action, then checks its work
  • Only closes the ticket once the fix is verified
  • Escalates to a human only on genuine exceptions
  • Like a self-driving car: corrects course until it arrives

ITSM Today: The Open-Loop Grind

A very typical journey for one alert

1

Monitoring fires an alert

2

Ticket auto-created

3

Human triages (eventually)

4

Human logs in & fixes it

5

Human closes the ticket

⚠️ Automation’s job ends at step 2 — steps 3–5 are manual, and nobody verified the fix held.

ITSM Tomorrow: The Closed Loop

Same alert, radically different journey

1

Monitoring fires an alert

2

Auto-diagnosis finds root cause

3

Auto-remediation playbook runs

4

Auto-verify the fix held

5

Ticket auto-closes, audit trail

🤖 Humans get paged only when the robot genuinely can’t fix it.
🧠 POP QUIZ #2

In a traditional (open-loop) shop, how many manual hand-offs does the average L1 database alert pass through?

Tap an answer to reveal.

ANSWER

C.  ~6

Monitoring → queue → L1 → L2 → on-call DBA → approval → closure. Closed-loop automation collapses most of that into one self-verifying step.

KPIs That Actually Move

Illustrative before/after, based on typical ITSM automation benchmarks

MTTR (Mean Time to Resolve)

BEFORE~4 hrs
AFTER~20 min

MTTA (Mean Time to Acknowledge)

BEFORE~15 min
AFTERseconds

First-Time Fix Rate

BEFORE~55%
AFTER90%+

Ticket Reopen Rate

BEFORE~30%
AFTER<5%

The Dollar Difference

Illustrative math — plug in your own ticket volume

Manual L1/L2 ticket touch

~$30

fully loaded, per touch

Escalated L3 ticket touch

$150–300+

once it bounces upstairs

Sample Scenario: 1,000 alerts / month

Open-loop: 1,000 × ~$30 manual touch≈ $30,000/mo
Closed-loop: ~80% auto-resolved, 20% manual≈ $9,200/mo
Estimated monthly savings≈ $20,800

→ roughly $250K/year back in the budget.

🧠 POP QUIZ #3 (FINAL)

What’s a common industry ballpark for the fully-loaded cost of ONE manual L1 ticket touch?

Tap an answer to reveal.

ANSWER

B.  ~$30

That’s the cheap seats — escalate to L2/L3 and you’re past $150–300 per touch. Closed-loop automation keeps tickets from ever needing that escalation.

Behold: The Loop

It just… keeps… closing.

1

Sense

2

Diagnose

3

Act

4

Verify

5

Confirm

IT Ops:
sleeping soundly

Why Bother Closing the Loop?

Fewer 2 AM pages

Routine fixes never reach a human phone.

Lower MTTR

Minutes, not hours.

Higher first-time fix

Verified, not just “actioned.”

Fewer reopens

Loop won’t close until it’s really gone.

Audit-ready trail

Every cycle logged automatically.

DBAs do DBA things

Freed for real engineering work.

Stop Babysitting Tickets.

Let the Loop Close Itself.

“Set it and forget it” should actually mean it got fixed.

Curious what this looks like running against your own Oracle fleet? We’d love to show you. Contact us →

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The difference hyper-automation makes:

High speed icon Blazing Speed

How would you like your six-months-long projects completed in under two?      Under budget? What if you only had to wait seconds for a complex technical problem to be solved, instead of the weeks it usually takes for people to get around to it? Or a change request delivery that is faster than a vending machine selling you a Cola?       > Click

< Click to collapse

Here is the life cycle of a conventional IT change.

Life Cycle of an IT Change

The assessment, routing, approval, and implementation stages alone may take weeks. The execution stage also often takes hours or even days. In some cases, the administraor may become ill or unavailable, prompting the escalation manager to seek an alternative. In the case of hyper-automation, however, there is no waiting. The delivery starts in seconds - be it an Incident resolution or a Change Request execution. 

Life Cycle of a Hyper-automated IT Change

Here is another example: a long-running project, like fleet upgrade or DC migration (depicted below).  

Project Duration Conventional 

These take time for two reasons. Unlike robots, people don’t work 24x7x365. They are also terrible at multi-tasking and tracking dependencies, especially if the project involves multiple parallel tasks executed by disparate teams, departments or business units. That is why hyper-automation is perfectly capable of condensing the same 6-month-long DC Migration project to just two short months.

Replayable, Automated project duration

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Low cost icon Low Cost

What if you didn't have to hire a team of professionals to manually manage resource provisioning, asset configuration, issue troubleshooting, hardware setup, and so on? Automation saves time and money. How much money? Click to see just one example of what hyper-automation can do.     > Click

< Click to collapse

Here is a comparison of an omni-vendor enterprise-wide emergency password rotation, performed on 10,000 database assets at the same time to address an immediate security threat. It compares a conventionally automated activity with a hyper-automated one. Apart from the duration of the task dropping from 34 years (yes, that is how long the activity would take for a team of professionals to do this!) to only a couple of hours, the cost falls from $19.2 miliion dollars to $200.

Password rotation automated vs hyper-automated.

You may ask: how is that even possible?

It became possible as soon as the manager assigned the emergency password rotation Change Request to a hyper-automated group, instead of a regular database team like the San Diego Database department group hown below. This department is not automated, of course.

the San Diego database group, un-automated

The conventional San Diego DBA team employs 9 top-notch database administrators at a cost of slightly over $1 million per year, plus benefits. These people work only certain hours a day and certain days a week. Their knowledge and experience are not interchangeable, meaning that what one employee knows and does, the next may not be able to replicate immediately. However, they are getting paid whether they are working, coasting, or entirely at rest. Even ServiceNow shows the hourly rate for the San Diego database administrator as $114/hr.

the San Diego database group, un-automated

But that San Diego team was a conventional, unautomated department. Let's assign the same Change Request to a hyper-automated team instead. This department is the perfect candidate: "Database Atlanta". It employs only one administrator, Bow Ruggeri, and the second employee is a hyper-automation module ("Replayable" is the name of a product).

the hyper-automated Database Atlanta group

Yes, hyper automation software appears as an employee in ServiceNow, but a very special one. This employee never eats, sleeps, never has personal issues, or asks for a raise. It works round'the'clock, 24 by 7. It is 1,000 times more productive than the 9-count San Diego database administration team. Here is how much the hyper-automated Database Atlanta group costs the enterprise: $17.12 an hour.

the hyper-automated Database Atlanta group description

Here is the hyper-automation module's HR entry in ServiceNow.

the hyper-automated Database Atlanta group description.

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< Click to collapse

High quality icon High Quality

The IT professionals are doing their best. For some IT departments that is good enough. Others think they can do better. For those who want nothing but the best, we offer mature automation workflows that always adhere to vendor best practices, ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) alignment, risk mitigation and cost containment. For large enterprises, IT service delivery errors cost an average of $9,000 per minute. Major operational failures can be catastrophic; for example, the high-profile scheduling crisis at Southwest Airlines resulted in up to $825 million in total losses and a $140 million civil penalty. Hyper-automation operates in an error-free reality. Unlike humans, it runs precisely what must be run, where it must be run at the right time. That means projects are delivered faster, way below budgets, features released ahead of schedule - that means competitive edge, that means new customers, that means bonuses for all involved (except for the automation software that made that possible, of course!)       > Click

< Click to collapse

People commit mistakes. That's a fact. No matter how much effort your team puts in, they are bound to make errors, several of them, in fact. This includes situations like running the wrong script, on the wrong database, not running it on time, not being prepared (not having the right password or connect string), not understanding the prerequisites or the handover process, and so on. In the case of Closed-Loop Automation, the execution logic remains unchanged. It doesn't depend on how much sleep the admin got the night before. It scans execution logs (sometimes thousands of them, in parallel) in real time as they are written. If it detects an error, it immediately opens an Incident in ServiceNow for the DBA to investigate the failed CR and attach the error log. It does not understand the concept of "good enough" and honestly thinks that 9-5 is just a number. Another way to describe hyper automation is that it is always at its best, 24x7x365. Forget that —not just at ITS best, but at the INDUSTRY's best, because whatever the technology or vendor, hyper-automation modules have vendors' best practices embedded. You execute the Change Requests and Resolve Incidents repeatedly, and get predictable results every single time. That is because our software is built on vendor best practices, aligned with ITIL principles, with documented risk mitigation and cost containment at every step. It's like having a hundred PhDs in Computer Science on standby, or just as many IT industry veterans, handling your day-to-day operations.

Imagine you had to perform an Oracle database upgrade.

Not a patch — a real version upgrade, the kind every DBA team dreads. You're moving a production database from Oracle 21c to 26ai, and there's no room for a mistake: get it wrong, and you're looking at hours of downtime, corrupted application connections, or a rollback scramble at 2 AM. Here's what actually happens when Replayable runs it — and why each part of that process is a genuine safeguard, not busywork.

Vendor best practices. Oracle's own guidance says never upgrade production directly — clone the environment first, upgrade the clone, validate it, then touch production. Replayable's upgrade workflow does exactly that: it runs Oracle's AutoUpgrade tool through its analyze phase before ever touching a live database, surfacing version-incompatibility issues and blocking conditions in advance. If the analysis fails, nothing has been risked yet — no downtime, no half-finished upgrade, just a clean stop before the point of no return.

ITIL alignment. Every upgrade change is classified honestly, not rubber-stamped: risk and impact are both marked High (because a version upgrade genuinely is), the affected database is linked as a real Configuration Item, and a planned maintenance window is recorded before a single command runs. If your compliance team ever needs to show an auditor exactly what was changed, when, and how much risk was assumed going in, it's already documented — not reconstructed after the fact.

Risk mitigation. The upgrade doesn't just run and hope. It checks four separate times that things are actually in the state they need to be — before starting, after the analysis phase, after the deploy phase, and after the final restart — and it never proceeds past a checkpoint that fails. And if something does go wrong, the failure-handling logic is smart enough to tell the difference between "this upgrade genuinely failed" and "this is leftover recovery data from an earlier interrupted attempt" — a distinction that, done wrong, has cost real DBA teams hours of chasing the wrong problem.

Cost containment. Out-of-place upgrades need real infrastructure — cloning a full Oracle home can mean an extra 300GB of storage that nobody budgeted for. Instead of quietly provisioning it and surprising someone in next month's cloud bill, Replayable estimates the cost up front and holds the upgrade until a budget owner explicitly approves it. No surprise charges. No "who authorized this storage" conversation after the fact.

Here is the yearly error rate for ServiceNow Incident resolution, compared between a team of top-notch DBAs and a hyper-automation software.

Error rate comparison


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Resilience icon Ownership

Resource configuration is a labor- and skill-intensive task, usually handled by highly paid and sought after resources. When one of them leaves the organization, they take their knowledge with them. Not only that, the years of training you've invested in the person will start benefiting your competition from then on. The replacement you hire will require time, effort, and even more training to understand the predecessor's code, which he will ultimately discard to write his own. His effort, in turn, won't be reused either. With hyper-automation, the code always remains with the organization.      > Click

< Click to collapse

What used to be physical (the servers) is now just definition code that explains to the Cloud what it is. You owe it to yourself to protect your investment. With hyper-automation, the task definitions and automation workflows never leave your repository, always properly secured, versioned, and tagged. The administrators don't even see the low level code, which runs by itself when the end-user clicks the "Submit" button in ServiceNow. The code doesn’t require DBA understanding, because it is modular.  Replayable code

This is the same shift that’s already happened to labor once mechanized: once the object being maintained is code instead of hardware, the skilled maintainer becomes a codified, repeatable process instead of a person. We think that’s the direction all of skilled IT labor is headed — read our manifesto on why.

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Accountability icon Accountability

There is never any pointing fingers with our software. When you need to trace changes to definition files, you can do it with ease. They are versioned, so all changes are recorded for your review at a later time. So, once again, there's never any confusion on which module did what, when, where, and why.      > Click

< Click to collapse

With the advent of the Cloud, it became almost impossible to keep up with different vendors and technologies. In the case of automation, the code is in a single source of truth.

Replayable, ServiceNow

There is one centralized code repo (Github, Gitlab or similar), one encryption Vault for storing passwords/certificates, and one location for execution logs (ServiceNow ticketing), no matter which Cloud vendor or product is used. There’s never any confusion about what the automation did, where, when and why. You execute it repeatedly and get predictable results every single time. There is never any finger-pointing, when it comes to IT services automation.

Replayable, ServiceNow

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Scalability icon Infinite Scalability

The automated solution can run 1,000 Change Requests at the same time, elevating admins from low-level button pushers and script runners to a more prestigious status as architects. With a Closed-Loop implementation, you may increase your workload exponentially before there is even a need for a Control Node upgrade.       > Click

< Click to collapse

Replayable, DBA rested

The load a current IT service management team carries can be increased by 5%-10%, and only for a few days. If the number or the priority of the requests is to double today, the process becomes unmanageable by the current headcount. It doesn’t matter how much money you throw at your employees. Overworked, they will eventually burn out and quit to serve your competitor.

Replayable, DBA tired

Our closed-loop automation software will do an equally brilliant job whether it runs on one server or a thousand at the same time. The image below runs a Change Request on a server named "lnx1000" (that is a screenshot of the automation inventory file).

Replayable, scalability settings

If you want the same task run on a thousand servers, all you have to do is to replace the "lnx1000" with "lnx[000:999]". The automation software will run the same CR on servers lnx000, lnx001, lnx002 ... and all the way to lnx999. A thosand of them!

Replayable, scalability settings

That is the equivalent of hiring a thousand DBAs on a moment's notice and releasing them just as quickly during a busy period, or when your company expands. Our automation software will do an equally brilliant job, whether it works on one server or a thousand at the same time.

Replayable, scalability settings

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Security icon Secure Encryption

The automation uses the AES-256bit symmetric encryption algorithm. That means all sensitive data, whether in transit or at rest, is always encrypted: passwords, variables, certificates, API keys, and other credentials. The automation Vault prevents any sensitive data exposure, even once. The automation never leaves execution logs on the servers it manages; all logs are stored centrally in ServiceNow and Ansible.     > Click

< Click to collapse

Replayable, vault

What is the best way of ensuring your mission-critical passwords are never distributed to unauthorized personnel? The answer is obvious. Do not distribute to any personnel at all. Let the robots handle the sensitive data. That is what they are best at.

Each instance of storing that password on a hard drive in clear text, even for a second, violates basic database security auditing rules. The same applies to unencrypted network communication. For a small company that may not pose a credible threat. However, large enterprises are often under strict auditing rules. Security violations are a matter of life and death. For example, if a quaterly audit finds elevated passwords stored on a server o transmitted via network, the auditing entity may revoke a long-standing contract. Hundreds of millions of dollars are at stake, and countless jobs are on the line. 

Replayable, Ansible vault

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Extending Proven Governance to Your Biggest Move

The ITIL alignment, risk mitigation, and cost containment demonstrated throughout this page are not limited to routine operations. We are bringing that same governed automation to Oracle-to-AWS migration itself — the highest-stakes project most database teams ever run. See our approach to migration automation →


Want the full technical detail behind these claims? Here's where each of them is actually documented, step by step, in the real automation logic — not just described in general terms above. To see it in action use the Demo link.

Please download this code from https://github.com/r-able/Oracle-SelfService . The code is free.