As someone that previously worked at a FAANG supporting a service in an on call rotation, the most obvious useful missing feature of atuin desktop’s new runbooks is the ability to track what happened. All of the following questions help manage an incident when it occurs:
Did the commands run successfully?
What was the output of commands that investigate some issue?
What was restarted?
When did things happen (UTC timestamps)?
Did anything need to go “off script” in order to complete?
Are there validation steps that can be marked success / fail?
Are there rollback commands that apply to each step?
Are there places to record input from other systems (non-terminal output)?
Can this all be exported to capture exactly what went on so that a post mortem has all the necessary details?
Can the run status be shared realtime with other people (i.e. a Sev 1 conference call) in a read only way?
Can I get notifications someone when a particular run book is being run?
Can I get a list of all runs that happened previously for this run book and the output of all commands?
Can I get a full export of a session? (maybe “Session” is the missing concept?)
There’s probably much more in this, and perhaps the tool is not really targeting those use cases. But perhaps this helps set some directional ideas to think about.
Definitely something we want runbooks to grow into. For smaller teams, what’s there now already works well for incidents.
Most of the features you mentioned fall under access control or compliance/audit. Those are the kinds of things we’ll likely keep in future paid or enterprise tiers, since they’re mainly useful for bigger orgs and FAANG-esque companies.
Our goal is to keep Atuin mostly open and free for individuals and small teams, and fund the company through heavier, compliance-driven functionality that larger orgs need. For example, in this case, storing that data for an individual user could be free, but surfacing it to privileged users in an org would not be.
Thank you for the feedback! Really appreciate the ideas and input. Please let me know if there’s anything else I can help with
Most of the features you mentioned fall under access control or compliance/audit. … they’re mainly useful for bigger orgs and FAANG-esque companies.
I’m strongly in disagreement with this take on what I wrote above. Communicating what changed / what happened is something every IT pro needs from solo dev to Fortune 500 team. Right now Atuin run books only answer the question “what SHOULD I do”, but ignore the much more useful one “what DID I do”.
I’m not currently in a role where these ideas really matter to me much, so this is mainly sharing my previous experience on things that I would have wanted in a tool like this. So strong opinions weakly held.
