Transcript
Today we're going to talk about automation in Encentral. It is used in multiple different areas to achieve IT goals most effectively and save valuable time and effort. When you think about automation, you have to think of automation in three respects. One is self-healing, two, proactive, and the third, reactive. I'll show each of these areas starting with how a recovery script can be executed with self-healing, automatically addressing device issues so you won't have to manually. Next I'll build a comprehensive workstation maintenance policy to deploy a script proactively to prevent issues before they occur. And finally, I'll cover reactive automation with a system reboot example that helps ensure device performance and stability. We will also touch on a great resource for speeding up time to value of your automation projects, which is the Encentral developer portal. Before we close, I'm going to take you through self-healing in Encentral. It is one of the defining aspects of remediation within the Encentral product. From here, what we're going to do is we're going to click into a device. I've got my server 2022. I'm going to click into the monitoring and then I'm going to choose the Cove app monitoring. As you can see that there is a problem here. When I click into that, I'm going to click into self-healing. Now I'm going to choose failed and warning. I'm going to retry that monitoring three times just to be sure that the monitoring isn't flapping or going back and forth. I'm going to execute a self-healing action. From here, I'm going to click into action. What do I want that action to be? I can do a Windows service, an automation manager policy, or execute a script. I'm going to choose execute an automation policy. From here, what I'm going to do is I'm going to search for my Cove agent install and I'm going to choose the Cove data protection agent deploy. From here, all I need to do is select the custom property or fill out the necessary fields and click okay. Next what we're going to do is build a comprehensive workstation maintenance policy using automation manager. Now, when you use automation manager, you have to think in three categories, no code, low code, or even pro code. Effectively, no code means you do not have to have coding experience to be able to use automation manager. What we're going to do is we're going to use this workstation maintenance policy that I've already pre-downloaded. I have now loaded that into Uncentral. Then you can see all of the objects one by one that we are using to be able to accompany this particular workstation maintenance policy. Now, if you have PowerShell experience, what you're going to be able to do is use our PowerShell object. You're going to be able to drag that in and you can even accompany your own code or what we call low code or pro code. You can now build and add in your own code directly into automation manager. Next, I'm going to show you the value of reactive automation in Uncentral. I have now pre-loaded this particular policy called system reboot. What effectively this system reboot policy does is if a device has been up for too long, say 14 days, 21 days, it will then automatically reboot after a period of time. What we're going to do here is we're going to get the last boot up time effectively so that we know the uptime. We're going to do a date difference on that date versus the amount of time that it has been up for. If that number is greater than say 14, 21, we're going to check to see if the user is logged in. If that user is logged in, what we're going to do is prompt them. We're going to say your computer needs to restart to increase performance or something like that. Then we're going to wait 300 seconds, 15 minutes, whatever you set it to. Then we're going to log off that user and initialize a system restart. Now if the user is not logged in, what we're going to do is then continue on and automatically reboot that end user. This is a really great example of being able to use reactive automation to accomplish a goal, which in fact is that we're going to be able to get those patches installed within a predefined time like 14 to 21 days. Now that I'm taking you through the three key aspects of automation in Central, that being self-healing, proactive, and reactive, I do want to also point out that there is automation extended outside of NCentral. First and foremost, what we have is the enabled developer portal. From here, I can come in and click on the Central. I can now ask the AI to build me a script if I so choose, but I can also go to the recipes. From here, we have close to 900 automation policies that you're going to be able to pull into various products within Enable, including NCentral. Now we also have our APIs within NCentral, whereby we're building more and more APIs each and every week and month. And of course, we have plenty of third-party integrations for NCentral, whereby we're going to be able to extend those integrations directly into NCentral as well. Thanks for learning about automation and NCentral. My name is Jason Murphy, one of the head nerds at Enable. Feel free to click the link to start a trial.
