Overview of StackStorm: An Open‑Source Automation and Integration Platform

Overview

StackStorm is a platform for integration and automation across services and tools. It links your existing infrastructure and application environment, making it easier to automate actions, especially those taken after events occur.

StackStorm helps automate common operational patterns, such as convenient fault diagnosis (triggered by monitoring systems like Nagios, Senu, New Relic), automatic remediation (identifying hardware failures on OpenStack nodes, evacuating instances, notifying admins, and invoking PagerDuty if needed), and continuous deployment (building with Jenkins, provisioning AWS clusters, routing traffic via load balancers, and rolling forward or back based on New Relic performance data).

These patterns can be combined into rules, workflows, or actions, which are stored as code, enabling collaborative development and sharing through the StackStorm community.

How It Works

StackStorm inserts into the environment via a scalable set of adapters containing sensors and actions.

Sensors are Python plugins that receive or monitor inbound/outbound events. When an external event occurs, the sensor emits a StackStorm trigger.

Triggers are StackStorm representations of external events, including generic triggers (timers, webhooks) and integration triggers (e.g., Senu alerts, JIRA issue updates). New trigger types can be defined by writing sensor plugins.

Actions are StackStorm outbound integrations. They include generic actions (SSH, REST calls), integrations (OpenStack, Docker, Puppet), or custom actions. Actions can be Python plugins or any script, usable via CLI, API, or within rules and workflows.

Rules map triggers to actions (or workflows), applying matching criteria and mapping trigger payloads to action inputs.

Workflows stitch actions together into “super‑actions,” defining order, conditional logic, and data passing. Most automation requires multiple steps, so workflows manage these sequences and can be invoked manually or by rules.

Packages are units of content deployment, grouping integrations (triggers and actions) and automation (rules and workflows) for easier management and sharing via the StackStorm Exchange.

Execution audit trails record full details of trigger contexts and results, stored in audit logs for integration with external logging and analysis tools such as LogStash, Splunk, StatsD, and syslog.

StackStorm features a modular architecture of loosely coupled services communicating over a message bus, scaling horizontally to deliver automation at scale. It provides a Web UI, CLI client, full REST API, and Python client bindings for developers.

StackStorm is a new, actively developed product seeking community feedback to refine its direction.