Overview of StackStorm: An Open-Source Automation Platform

StackStorm is a platform for integration and automation across services and tools, linking existing infrastructure and application environments to simplify automation, especially focusing on actions taken after events occur.

It helps automate common operational patterns, such as:

Convenient troubleshooting – triggering diagnostics across Nagios, Senu, New Relic, and other monitoring systems, then publishing results to shared communication contexts like HipChat or JIRA.

Automatic remediation – detecting hardware failures on OpenStack compute nodes, evacuating instances, notifying administrators, and freezing workflows to invoke PagerDuty for human intervention when needed.

Continuous deployment – building and testing with Jenkins, provisioning a new AWS cluster, routing traffic via load balancers, and performing roll‑forward or roll‑back based on New Relic performance data.

These patterns can be combined into rules and workflows (or actions) that are stored as code, allowing collaborative development and sharing within the open‑source community.

How It Works

StackStorm inserts into environments 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 represent external events in StackStorm, with generic triggers (timers, webhooks) and integration triggers (e.g., Senu alert, JIRA issue updates). New trigger types can be defined by writing sensor plugins.

Actions are outbound integrations, including generic actions (SSH, REST calls) and integrations (OpenStack, Docker, Puppet). Actions can be Python plugins or any script, usable via CLI, API, or as part of 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 transformations, and data passing; most automation requires multiple steps.

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.

Audit trails record full details of trigger contexts and execution results, captured in logs for integration with external logging and analysis tools such as LogStash, Splunk, statsd, and syslog.

StackStorm’s modular architecture consists 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 to simplify developer interaction.

StackStorm is a new, actively developed product that welcomes community participation, feedback, and direction.