Automation and Trigger Overview

Automations associate triggers with runbooks, causing a runbook to execute an investigation in response to a trigger, based on user-defined conditional criteria. Automations are used for all trigger categories (new incident, incident lifecycle, and external) and all of their constituent trigger types.

Automations are managed using the Automation Management page at Automation > Automation Management.

Each automation comprises these components, which are defined using the Add an Automation wizard:

• Trigger — The occurrence to be investigated or recorded.

• Condition — The user-defined criteria that determines when a runbook will execute in response to the trigger.

• Runbook — The automated investigation to be executed in response to the trigger.

• Order of execution — The automation's precedence for its trigger type. Each automation must have a unique Order number for the trigger type; you cannot have two or more automations for a trigger type with the same Order number. If you create a new automation and assign it Order 1, all existing automations for that trigger type will be decreased in order (i.e., the previous Order 1 will become Order 2, and so forth down the list for that trigger type).
  The first automation that is matched for an incident or lifecycle trigger, according to the defined condition, is the automation that will execute for that trigger type. This means that, when more than one automation is defined for a trigger type, the first in order should have extremely specific and restrictive conditional criteria, with successive automations having increasingly broad and permissive conditional criteria.

See the Automation Overview video for a narrated tour of the Automation Management page.