The Next Horizon: Automation Virtual Summit 2026
The Illusion of Green: Automation Observability Beyond the Return Code
Session recap · Jon Hiett
The Bobfather
Bob Schwartz is the CEO of Robert Mark Technologies and has led the company to consistent double-digit growth for the last 10 years. He is an active member of the Workload Automation community and holds a seat on the Broadcom Partner Advisory Committee.
At a Glance:
- A green check and return code zero can hide a late, costly run
- Jon Hiett’s advice: leave execution where it is and unify visibility and analytics
- Measure three things: cost, performance and quality
- Report automation to the business in business terms
Session recap · The Next Horizon: Automation Virtual Summit 2026
Quantifying Trusted Orchestration: Measuring Cost, Performance, and Quality in the AI Era
Jon Hiett, Global Solution Architect, Broadcom
Every job on every dashboard is green. The 6 AM regulatory file still shows up late.
That’s the scenario Broadcom’s Jon Hiett laid out in “Quantifying Trusted Orchestration: Measuring Cost, Performance, and Quality in the AI Era” at The Next Horizon: Automation Virtual Summit 2026, presented by Broadcom and Google Cloud on September 24. Jon calls it the illusion of green, and it’s a handy lens for judging your own automation observability.
Use multiple orchestration tools
97%
Jon Hiett, citing recent research. 60% use four or more.
Confident they can meet business deadlines
84%
Yet 57% admit they may miss orchestration deadlines at least monthly.
Don’t provide showback or chargeback
53%
Survey figure Jon cited on automation cost.
A Green Check That Missed a Deadline
Here’s Jon’s story. An Apache Airflow pipeline gets a flood of unexpected data and spins up thousands of unplanned task executions. It ends with return code zero, a green check, but with a big unplanned cost and a finish two hours past its historical baseline.
The AutoSys financial job waiting on that pipeline misses its window, and the 6 AM regulatory data delivery misses its deadline. On each tool’s dashboard, every job is green.
Every engineer did their job, Jon said, and the business still faced regulatory fines and reputational damage.
Odds Are, You Run More Than One Scheduler
In more than a quarter century of IT automation, Jon said, the goal hasn’t changed: get data to the business accurately and on time. The complexity has exploded.
AutoSys and Automic anchor the core, Jon said: the ledger, inventory management and the transaction engines that keep the lights on. Data teams add Apache Airflow and cloud-native schedulers for Python pipelines and machine learning. Mergers and acquisitions bring in more. The single-pane-of-glass scheduler, Jon said, “has largely remained just that, a dream.”
Citing recent research, Jon said 97% of companies use multiple orchestration tools and 60% use four or more. Those tools don’t share telemetry, so handoffs between them happen blind.
Why Green Isn’t Good Enough
Jon tied this to the Dimensional Research survey that David Gehringer and Aline Gerew presented earlier in the summit: 84% of teams are confident they can meet business process deadlines, yet 57% admit they may miss orchestration deadlines at least monthly.
Confident and missing deadlines at the same time? That’s the illusion of green at work, Jon said. A tool reports on its own job and nothing else. The better questions, in Jon’s words: What did it cost? Did it meet the business window? And what was the downstream impact?
Automation Observability: Unify the View, Not the Tools
The tempting fix is one scheduler for everyone. Jon said that no longer works: ask a data scientist to give up Airflow and they’ll resist, and forced consolidation slows the business down.
“The answer isn’t to force consolidation at the execution level,” Jon said. Leave execution where it is and unify at the visibility and analytics layer, around what Jon calls the three dimensions of trusted orchestration: cost, performance and quality. Chase performance alone and costs skyrocket. Cut costs alone and quality degrades.
Jon said Broadcom’s Automation Analytics & Intelligence (AAI) enables this. AAI sits above execution, takes in telemetry from tools such as AutoSys, Automic and Airflow, and normalizes it. Teams keep the tools they love, and leadership gets one quantified view.
Cost: Who’s Paying for That Pipeline?
Cost is the number-one challenge of managing multiple orchestration tools, Jon said, cited by 53% of survey respondents. And 53% of organizations surveyed don’t provide showback or chargeback.
Jon said AAI attaches financial values to workload executions, so chargeback and showback rest on actual automation consumption. Jon’s example: a department’s ad hoc pipeline triggered 50,000 job executions this month, costing $12,000. Is that report worth it? The same view uncovers what Jon calls ghost workloads: redundant pipelines that keep running but serve no purpose.
Available today? In the closing session, Broadcom’s Rajeev Kumar said chargeback and showback are part of AAI v26, which Broadcom recently released.
Performance: It’s About the Deadline
For Jon, performance isn’t how many seconds a job takes. It’s SLA management and the true critical path. Picture a month-end close. A file arrival watched by ESP triggers an ETL pipeline in Airflow, and the chain ends in Automic. If one early link slows by just 10%, when does the last job run? Nobody can do that math by hand across tens of thousands of cross-platform jobs, yet a survey Jon cited found 64% of companies still rely on manual processes to meet orchestration deadlines.
Jon described AAI building historical baselines, calculating the critical path across schedulers and generating a predictive signal. In Jon’s example, an Airflow pipeline running a little long hasn’t failed, but it’s on track to breach a 6 AM ledger deadline in Automic. Your engineers get a head start instead of a fire drill.
Quality: Find the Broken Link Faster
When five scheduling consoles flag hundreds of minor issues an hour, the alerts that matter get lost. Jon said the slow part of resolving an incident is finding the problem, not fixing it. You’ve probably sat on that bridge call: the cloud data team swears its Airflow DAG is fine, the automation team says its side is clear, and the clock ticks.
Because AAI links data across the estate, Jon said, it serves as a single source of truth for root cause analysis and points straight to the broken link. Its historical analytics also surface bottlenecks, unreliable workloads and technical debt.
Talk Like the Business
“We executed 50,000 jobs flawlessly last night” sounds like background noise to a CFO. “They don’t run jobs,” Jon said. “They run a business.”
Jon’s suggested alternatives: we eliminated 10,000 redundant job executions this quarter, cutting your department’s chargeback by 15%. Or: the morning logistics report now lands two hours early.
Jon’s parting challenge: “please look past the return code zero.”
What This Means for You
Run more than one scheduler? Your automation observability has to cover all of them. Which cross-tool handoffs sit on your critical path? Could you tell a business unit what its pipelines cost last month? When something breaks, how long does it take to find the broken link?
RMT is a Broadcom partner with 25 years of workload automation experience. We can help you map those handoffs, see where AAI fits and plan the next step.
Still trusting the green checkmark? Book a free 30-minute assessment with RMT.
Ready to look past the green check?
Bring your list of schedulers. We’ll help you map the handoffs between them, see where AAI fits and plan the next step.
More from the summit
The Next Horizon: Automation Virtual Summit 2026, session by session
- Why AI Projects Fail: Sol Rashidi on the Human Advantage
- MCP Server Security: Agentic AI Without the Chaos
- Intelligent Control Plane in Practice: 4 Automic Automation Use Cases
- Evertec’s VM Rightsizing Automation: From Manual Tickets to One Automic Workflow
- The Orchestration Accountability Gap: Inside the SLA Illusion
- From Black Box to Glass Box: A Blueprint for AI Agent Governance
- The Illusion of Green: Automation Observability Beyond the Return Code (you’re here)
- Broadcom Automation Roadmap: What Shipped and What’s Next