Measuring Automation Impact
Tracking time saved and outcomes.
Why Measure at All
Automation is an investment. Building and maintaining playbooks costs engineering time. To justify that spend and to know what to improve, you must measure the impact of every automated workflow.
Without metrics you cannot tell a playbook that saves hours per week from one that quietly makes bad decisions faster. Measurement turns automation from a faith-based exercise into an engineering discipline.
Time Saved per Execution
The most intuitive metric is analyst time saved. For each automated task, estimate the manual baseline, then multiply by run volume.
If a phishing triage took 30 minutes manually and runs 200 times a month:
manual_minutes = 30
runs_per_month = 200
automated_minutes = 2 # human only reviews the result
saved_per_run = manual_minutes - automated_minutes # 28
monthly_hours_saved = saved_per_run * runs_per_month / 60 # ~93 hrsAll lessons in this course
- Why SOAR Matters
- Playbook Design
- Integrations and Enrichment
- Measuring Automation Impact