StackStorm

StackStorm is an open-source server application designed for integration and automation across various services and tools. It functions as an event-driven platform that executes specific actions in response to system events, allowing users to automate operational patterns such as troubleshooting, remediation, and continuous deployment. The software is deployed on 64-bit Linux systems and provides a web UI, a CLI client, and a REST API for management and operation.

Users define automation logic through rules and workflows that tie together existing infrastructure and application environments. These configurations are stored as code, which enables version control and collaboration. The platform can be integrated with monitoring tools like Nagios, Sensu, or New Relic, communication tools like Slack or JIRA, and cloud infrastructure such as AWS or OpenStack. For example, it can trigger diagnostic checks on physical nodes after a failure is captured by a monitoring tool and post the results to a shared communication context.

Key features

• Sensors that monitor external systems for inbound events
• Triggers that represent external events including timers and webhooks
• Actions that perform outbound integrations via Python plugins or scripts
• Rules that map specific triggers to actions or workflows
• Workflows that sequence multiple actions with transition conditions
• Packs that group integrations and automations for deployment and sharing
• Audit trails that record full execution details and triggering contexts
• Integration with external logging tools like Splunk and LogStash

The architecture consists of loosely coupled microservices that communicate over a message bus, allowing the system to scale horizontally to deliver automation at scale. It uses an extensible plugin system where sensors and actions are written in Python. The platform includes Python client bindings for developer convenience. This design is intended for site reliability engineers and DevOps teams who need to coordinate complex tasks across multiple disparate tools and platforms, such as evacuating instances on an OpenStack compute node or managing traffic via a load balancer during a deployment.

StackStorm serves as an orchestration layer for automating infrastructure operations and responding to system alerts.