The AutomationAI dashboard at a glance

This article tours the main navigation in CloudRadial AutomationAI so you know where each area is and what it's for. It applies to all roles.

• The Home Dashboard
• The Sidebar
• The Learn Guide
• The Header
• The Getting Started Checklist

The Home Dashboard

Home is your landing page and gives you your automation control plane at a glance. It summarizes your Playbooks (how many are active, waiting, and need approval) and your Workflows, and shows run volume and success rate over the last seven days, your active deployments, how many runners are online, run outcomes by day, AI usage for the current period, items that need attention, and a live activity feed.

A brand-new workspace with no runners, deployments, or runs instead shows a first-run panel headed Your automations run in your Azure, not ours. It explains that AutomationAI plans and orchestrates while a runner, a small set of Azure Functions you deploy, does the work inside your own environment. It covers three benefits, each with a link to its help article:

• You choose where it runs: you deploy the runner into your own Azure subscription, in the region and resource group you pick
• Secrets stay in your tenant: vendor credentials live in the runner's private Key Vault, and the runner reaches AutomationAI over outbound HTTPS with every call signed
• AI at your provider's price: the AI your runners use is billed directly by your own AI provider, while building with AI Generate and planning uses your plan's Usage Credits

Select Register a runner, the primary action, to start setup, or Create a workflow to open the Designer. Once your workspace has a runner, deployment, or run, Home shows the full dashboard.

The Sidebar

The left sidebar is your primary navigation. Its items are:

• Home: the dashboard described above
• AI Playground: a test surface where you give an agent a goal and it works toward it using your own AI provider, installed extensions, and Key Vault secrets
• Playbooks: goal-directed plans that orchestrate your workflows and agents, run once or on a repeat, and learn from each run
• Workflows: your automation definitions; open one in the Designer to edit it, or create a new one
• Agents: the catalog of AI agents you can install, plus the custom agents you build
• Knowledge: a folder tree of documents your automations read and write, and that agents can be grounded on
• Extensions: the catalog of vendor integrations that add tools Agent nodes and the AI Playground can call
• Companies: your registry of downstream companies, used to scope integration secrets per company
• Routines: your cron-scheduled workflow executions
• History: every run across all workflows, with status and per-run detail
• Deployments: published workflow versions assigned to a runner and environment, ready to run
• Runners: the execution agents you operate, with their health and status

The sidebar organizes these into groups. An Actions group holds Playbooks and Workflows; a Foundations group holds Knowledge, Agents, Extensions, and Companies; a Schedule group holds Routines and History; and a Your Infrastructure group holds Deployments and Runners.

The Learn Guide

A Learn item is pinned to the bottom of the sidebar. Selecting it opens an in-app guide in a wide side panel, for example the Playbooks guide, so help is always within reach as you work. The guide follows your operating system's light or dark theme setting.

The Header

The top header carries account and support actions, from left to right:

• Settings (gear icon): your workspace settings, with sub-sections for Overview, Usage, Team, and Integrations
• Getting Started (play icon): the setup checklist that walks you through getting your workspace ready, step by step. A badge shows how many steps remain; see the next section
• What's New (bell icon): product update notes for each release
• About (question mark icon): the AutomationAI version and build date, a Check for updates link, and links to Support, Terms of Service, and Privacy Policy
• Your email and avatar: opens your Personal Settings, where you manage Preferences, Security, and Password
• Orion (the icon at the far right): opens Product Support, CloudRadial's support assistant powered by ServiceAI

The Getting Started Checklist

Selecting Getting Started in the header opens the setup checklist in a side panel, with a count of completed steps at the top. The eight steps are listed in the order you set up a workspace, because nothing runs until a runner is connected. Each step has a Read the guide link that opens its help article in a new tab, and a Set up button (or View, once done) that takes you to the right page. Steps tick automatically from your workspace's own data, so progress is shared by everyone in the workspace.

1. Register a runner: install the runner in your own Azure tenant. Ticks once a runner is registered.
2. Connect your key vault: add your credentials to your runner's Key Vault. Ticks once an active runner has checked in. A runner reads its own secret from that vault, so this shows the vault is connected; it does not check the credentials you add for your extensions.
3. Add your AI provider: connect the AI provider your runner uses. Ticks after your first successful AI Playground run, which proves your runner can reach its AI provider with a working key and model. A Playground run needs an installed extension, so this step ticks only after you install an extension and test in the AI Playground.
4. Install extensions: install the integrations your workflows will use. Ticks once an extension is installed.
5. Test in the AI Playground: give the agent a goal and confirm your tools can do the job. Ticks after any AI Playground run, so if this step is done but Add your AI provider is not, your provider isn't working yet.
6. Create a workflow: build a workflow in the Designer or draft one with AI Generate. Ticks once a workflow exists.
7. Deploy a workflow to a runner: publish a version and bind it to your runner. Ticks once a deployment exists.
8. Run and verify: trigger a run and read its log. Ticks once a workflow run exists.

If you are still having trouble, we're here to help! Submit a ticket here for assistance, and don't forget to check our status page to ensure there are no outages in your area.