The first step in the operational excellence process is to define operational priorities to focus on the high business impact area. Those areas could be applying automation, streamlining monitoring, developing team skills as workload evolves, and focusing on improving overall workload performance. These are tools and services available that crawl through your system by scanning logs and system activity. These tools provide a core set of checks that recommend optimizations for the system environment and help to shape priorities.

After understating priorities, you need to design the operation, which includes the understanding of workloads to design and building the procedures to support them. The design of a workload should consist of how it will be implemented, deployed, updated, and operated. An entire workload can be viewed as various application components, infrastructure components, security, data governance, and operations automation.

While designing for an operation, consider the following best practice:

• Automate your runbook with scripting to reduce human error, which creates an operating workload.
• Use resource identification mechanisms to execute operations based on defined criteria such as environment, various versions, application owner, and roles.
• Make incident responses automated so that, in the case of an event, the system should start self-healing without much human intervention. 
• Use various tools and capabilities to automate the management of server instances and overall systems.
• Create script procedures on your instances to automate the installation of required software and security patches when the server gets started. These scripts are also known as bootstrap scripts.

After the operation design, create a checklist for operational readiness. These checklists should be comprehensive to make sure the system is ready for operation support when going live in production. This includes logging and monitoring, a communication plan, an alert mechanism, a team skillset, a team support charter, a vendor support mechanism, and so on. For operational excellence planning, the following are the areas where you need appropriate tools for preparation:

• IT Asset Management
• Configuration management

Let's explore each area in more detail, to understand the available tools and processes.