Understanding Automations

At the time of writing this article, Automations is in Beta/Preview mode. Some functionalities are subject to change, so check back on this article until the full release to get the latest information.

The Automations feature adds the power to enable clients to self-service themselves in ways that you, the Partner, define. With Automations, you can enable actions within the CloudRadial portal to affect things like PSA opportunities, RMM commands, emails, and even webhook automations to any system or service that can receive/send them. 

CloudRadial Partners are limited to 5 Automations for Starter and Professional plans and unlimited for Enterprise.

For more details on the rationale and an overview of Automations, check out the video below. 

About Automations

• General Automations Overview
• Understanding Workflows
• About Activities: General Knowledge 
  • About the Activity: Create Quote
    • Adding Products to a Quote
  • About the Activity: RMM Commands (Datto Quick Job)
  • About the Activity: Send Email 
  • About the Activity: Webhook
  • About the Activity: Add to Planner
• Understanding Products
• Understanding Automations
  • Details
  • Workflow
• Running Automations
  • Automations Tab
  • Problem Reports and Service Requests
• Troubleshooting Automations

General Automations Overview

Automations can be found within the Partner > Automations area of the feature set within the left-hand menus for those with the highest levels of CloudRadial access. In this area, Partners can establish and build the Automations they wish to deploy to various areas within the portal.

The Automations area is comprised of four tabs:

• Automations
• Products
• Workflows
• Logs

Workflows and Products both are components of greater Automation. For the sake of clarity, it's easier to understand them by reviewing them in the opposite order. 

Understanding Workflows

Workflows are the templates of Automations. They are comprised of individual actions, which are called Activities. We'll discuss Activities in greater detail below in just a moment.

Workflows aren't necessary to use within Automations - however, they can be useful. They are templates that you can use to chain together multiple Activities. In situations where you want to build complex Automations, it may be a smart move to build smaller building blocks of Workflows that you can deploy repeatedly, rather than having to build them one by one in each Automation.

To add a Workflow:

1. Navigate to Partner > Automations
2. Select the Workflows tab
3. Select +Add to add a new Workflow
4. Drag and drop your desired Activities into the workflow and fill out their details

Let's explore the building blocks of Automations (Activities) in greater detail.

About Activities: General Knowledge

Activities are the building blocks of Automations and Workflows. They are the source of individual actions that drive the Automation process forward. There are currently four available Activities:

1. Create Quote (Specific lanugage depends on the connected PSA)
2. RMM Commands (Datto Quick Job)
3. Send Email
4. Webhook

Each Activity can have unique actions within it, and this is variable per each activity. Generally speaking, you can:

• Give Activities a description to clarify their purpose
• Make them active or inactive 
• Choose the source of their information input, from:
  • Manual Entry - Write in the static value of the Activity yourself.
  • User Input - Allow users to choose the result of the activity, such as in a form. 
  • Token - Define the value with a CloudRadial token, either at the global or company level. 
  • Activity Result -  Use the result of any previous Activity (which you select) to fill in details for the current Activity.

About the Activity: Create Quote

When connected to a supported PSA, CloudRadial can create an opportunity, estimate, and/or a quote within your PSA for you. For simplicity, we'll refer to this as the "Create Quote" option.

You can choose the Name of the created quote and the Sales Representative that it's listed under. The specific name and functions depend on what is available in the given PSA.

The following are available for specific PSA tools:

PSA Tool	Option(s) Available
ConnectWise Manage	Create Opportunity
Autotask	Create Opportunity, Create Quote
Kaseya BMS	Create Opportunity
Syncro	Create Estimate
Halo BMS	Create Opportunity, Create Quote

 

Adding Products to a Quote

The Products section is intended to bring in products from your PSA list to offer to clients during the specific Automation. Keep in mind that this list is not queried from your PSA directly - rather, it is pulled from your PSA items defined in the cached Products section of the Automations feature.

To pull in products, simply enter text to begin displaying products from the lookup and use the cart button to add them in. 

You can also adjust the quantity of products by clicking the 3 dots menu and clicking edit.

About the Activity: RMM Commands (Datto Quick Job)

Connect your RMM tool to allow CloudRadial to run commands of your choosing by selecting the component and the endpoints. At the time of writing this article, the only supported RMM is Datto RMM. As more organizations work with us to map appropriate RMM commands, this will evolve. 

For details on how to connect your Datto RMM to CloudRadial, read this article.

 

About the Activity: Send Email

The email activity allows a Partner to choose who the email comes From and who the email goes To. The Subject and Body of the email are also customizable to the Partner's needs. This is useful in instances where a Partner requires additional communication and confirmation for actions in an Automation.

Note: The Token source for Email activities needs to match up with an Email-specific token. If you select Token as an option and nothing appears, be sure to go to Partner > Settings > Tokens (under the Configuration column on the right) and create email tokens. 

About the Activity: Webhook

Webhooks can be used to trigger actions in other systems. Unlike the other webhook functions in CloudRadial, the Automations webhook is more flexible. The following can be customized:

• URL Destination
• Method
• Content Type
• Content Editor
• Authorization Header
• Request Headers (JSON)

About the Activity: Add to Planner

The Add to Planner activity allows Partners to use automations to add a card to the Planner board.

This can be useful for Partners who want users to be able to add items to the planner without having access to it. Through this automation, end users can use Problem Reports or Service Request items with this activity and have their answers to questions in the form fill out the Planner card for logging purposes.

To better understand how the full workflow of this Automation activity, please see this video. 

Reference links:

• Menu Item Tokens
• About the Planner

Understanding Products

Products are the product line items pulled directly from your PSA, if your PSA supports products.

Since many Partners have very long and repetitive product lists, CloudRadial allows Partners to pull in whichever products they wish into a cached version within CloudRadial. This both reduces the load times of product lookups AND helps to narrow down which product to use in an Automation.

To add in products:

1. Have a connected PSA to your CloudRadial tenant
2. Navigate to Partner > Automations 
3. Select the Products tab
4. Select the Import button at the top right
5. Select whichever product(s) you wish to import via the checkbox options
6. Use the Import Product buttons to pull them into CloudRadial 

In a future update, your products will sync with your PSA nightly. For now, if you wish to see the updated product list in the event of a change, select the Sync option within Partner > Automations > Products (tab). 

Understanding Automations

Automations is the culmination of Activities, Workflows, and Products into a state of execution. This is where you decide what happens, and in what order. Below, we'll explain each tab and how it can be used in an Automation. There is no right or wrong way to run an automation - keep your goals in mind of what you wish to automate and ensure you have no more or fewer steps than necessary to do so. 

To begin:

1. Navigate to Partner > Automations
2. Select +Add at the top right

Details

The Details tab is intended to help you build an easily identifiable Automation.

As you add a new automation: 

1. Enter the Name and Description as well as the Category
   • The Category field is there to assist in the sorting of Automations. Enter a value or select it from the list of existing ones.
   • You can also edit your categories in bulk from the Automations area, using the Settings gear at the top right

From this screen, you can also choose the following options via the checkboxes:

• Show products when placing an order
• Show price when placing an order

Both of these options change the display of products and pricing, respectively, within the Service Catalog display of Automations. We'll discuss this in more detail in another section below. 

Workflow

The Workflow area is where you can assemble your Activities in the order that you wish to run them in the Automation. Workflows and Activities are explained in detail in the section above. While you do NOT need to pre-build workflows as templates, you can save time if you template them. 

You can use the icon at the top right to import whichever Workflow you pre-built. 

 

Note - When Creating an Opportunity, the Member Maintenance permission in ConnectWise must be changed for the Sales Rep field to pull information. The dropdown is populated by the member list in ConnectWise (System > Members). 

System	Add Level	Edit Level	Delete Level	Inquire Level
Member Maintenance	All	All	None	All

 

Running Automations

The application of Automations will be pervasive throughout CloudRadial. Keep in mind that the goal is to put your Automation triggers into the hands of your clients, so the more places that they can access and enable them, the more time-saving and beneficial your portal becomes. 

Read the section(s) below to learn how to run Automations in their respective sections. 

Automations Tab

Once you have Automations ready to be ran, you can simply select them from the Partner > Automations tab. From here, you can select the button to Run Automation.  

Because this section is not client-visible, it is likely that your internal team will be running it here. You will need to specify the company at a minimum, as well as any other specific pieces of information that you defined in the automation (examples include things like specific machines, specific email addresses, etc.). 

Problem Reports and Service Requests

The most powerful application of automation is self-service. By putting the trigger to Automations in the hands of your clients, you empower them to fully self-service themselves. That gives you the greatest bang for the buck in terms of client satisfaction and internal labor reduction.

To add Automations into the Service Catalog and Problem Reports:

1. Log into your CloudRadial tenant
2. Create a Service Catalog item
   • Do this for a specific client within their Support > Request Service or the Support > Report a Problem area
     OR
   • Create the service catalog item within Partner > Content for mass distribution
3. When creating the form, set up the form as you wish. Add at least one question of the Automation type. 
   • You will be able to select from a dropdown list of your Automations. You can also use tokens to vary your automation on a client-by-client basis.  
     
     
     
     
4. Complete any other settings as you like, and select Submit to finalize the form

Predefined tokens: Using the Webhook and Email activities with Service Requests will allow you to utilize predefined tokens that work specifically with ticketing. Use this link to get more information.

Users will be able to trigger Automations as defined by your workflows. Be sure to experiment with your forms and interweave automation processes within them to enhance your self-service portal experience. 

As a final note, many MSPs enjoy having a ticket accompany the automation process so that they can track how many times it was used and even how much time it saved everyone. If you are inclined to do so, be sure to set your routing settings for the ticket to your preferences. 

If you do not wish to generate a ticket for automations, you can simply clear the routing settings from the automation-based ticket. The automation will still fire and no ticket will be generated.

Unique tokens: You can also create unique tokens with Automations and Service Requests for each question in a form. Click here to see an example.

Troubleshooting Automations

Automations can have a lot of potential outcomes, which also means that it can fail if things are configured incorrectly. At the time of writing, this feature is still in Beta/Preview. 

There may be bugs and other errors that occur. In general:

• If you experience bugs or simply have suggestions, please submit a ticket to log them.
  
  
• If you encounter errors with configurations, note that automations will trigger advisories within your Partner > Account > Advisories (tab) area. This can be helpful in troubleshooting what went wrong and how to fix it.
  
  
• If an automation were to fail in a ticket-based application (such as the Service Catalog), the ticket would still be generated to not interfere with your user's experience of the portal and its functionality. Still, be aware that automation will not run and you will need to fix any outstanding errors to get the automation to work as intended.