Lesson 6 of 7
Lesson 6 — RPA and IT Automation
Automate backups, monitoring, alerts and legacy systems that do not have APIs.
Learn it
IT automation keeps systems healthy without constant human attention: backups run, disks are checked, alerts fire when something is wrong.
RPA bots click through old software that has no API. They are useful but brittle: a button moving can break the bot.
Monitoring automation watches CPU, memory, disk space and network. When a threshold is crossed, it sends an alert or triggers a remediation script.
Infrastructure as Code (IaC) lets you describe servers and networks in files, then recreate them automatically — examples include Terraform and Ansible.
Key terms
- Monitoring
- Watching system health metrics over time.
- Alert
- A notification triggered when a metric crosses a threshold.
- RPA
- Software that mimics human clicks in existing applications.
- IaC
- Infrastructure as Code — managing systems through code files.
- Remediation
- An automatic action that fixes a detected problem.
A healthy server checklist
What should run automatically on every server?
- 1Backups: Run nightly, verify a sample restore weekly.
- 2Updates: Apply security patches on a schedule, with a reboot window.
- 3Monitoring: Track CPU, memory, disk and network; alert before failure.
- 4Logs: Collect logs centrally and alert on error patterns.
A simple disk-space alert in Bash
bash#!/bin/bash
THRESHOLD=90
USAGE=$(df / | awk 'NR==2 {print $5}' | tr -d '%')
if [ "$USAGE" -gt "$THRESHOLD" ]; then
echo "Disk on / is ${USAGE}% full" | mail -s "Disk alert" admin@school.edu
fiThe script checks disk usage, compares it to a threshold and emails only when there is a problem.
Try it
True or false about IT automation.
An untested backup is reliable.
RPA is usually faster and more stable than API automation.
Alert fatigue can make people ignore real problems.
Infrastructure as Code makes servers repeatable.
Challenge
Design an automated server-health routine for a school: check disk space, memory and whether a website responds. If any check fails, email IT and log the failure. If all pass, write a single 'all healthy' log line. Write it as pseudocode or Bash.
Pick whichever way suits you — every mode earns the same bonus XP.
Write at least 40 more characters to submit.
Mark your own work
Guided walkthrough — 0/3 clues revealed
- Clue 1 locked — reveal it only if you get stuck.
- Clue 2 locked — reveal it only if you get stuck.
- Clue 3 locked — reveal it only if you get stuck.
Each clue costs 4 XP (never below 20 XP). You'd earn 40 XP right now.