How to use Automations
Automations evaluate criteria on tickets and ticket comments, then take action when the criteria are met. Use them for the repeatable work your team does on a regular basis.
On this page:
How automations work
Service Automations work similarly to Workflow Automation in CRM and Marketing, but apply specifically to tickets and ticket comments. A typical use: alert an agent when a ticket has gone unresolved for a set number of days and may need escalating.
Every automation has a name, a description, an active or inactive status, a trigger (when it runs), one set of criteria, and the actions that run when those criteria are met.
ℹ️ A Service automation can have only one set of criteria, and cannot schedule actions to execute in the future.
To avoid unnecessary processing, automations don’t run on accounts where no user has signed in for the last 14 days.
Triggers
⚠️ A trigger can’t be changed after creation. Choose carefully when building the automation; changing it later means rebuilding.
An automation runs in one of three ways:
- When a ticket is first created
- When a ticket is edited
- On an hourly schedule
Immediate triggers
Ticket Created and Ticket Updated automations run as soon as the event happens, in the order they appear on their respective tabs. Once a ticket meets one automation’s criteria, subsequent criteria won’t affect it.
Time triggers
Hourly automations run against all non-closed tickets to check whether conditions are met. They don’t necessarily fire at the top of the hour; the run may start at any point within it.
A ticket that has already had more than 100 automations run over its lifetime is excluded from hourly runs, even if it’s still open.
One default time-triggered automation exists: Close solved tickets after 4 days, which closes any ticket marked Solved after 96 hours. It can be edited but not deleted.
Automation log
Every automation run against a ticket is recorded and timestamped in the Automation Log, which is how you identify which automation affected a given ticket.
Adding actions
Go to System Settings > Automations, select the automation, and in the Actions section click the Actions dropdown to choose one:
| Action | What it does |
|---|---|
| Send An Email | Sends an email to an address specified when creating the action. |
| Add New Webhook | Sets up a webhook sending information to an external application. |
| Run Lambda Function | Triggers a Lambda function to check, monitor, or update Insightly or other systems. |
| Update This Record | Updates selected fields on the triggered record. |
| Add/Remove Tags | Adds or removes tags on the triggered record. |
| Delete Ticket | Deletes the triggered record. |
Fill out the fields relevant to whichever action you picked, then click Save.
How criteria and actions run
Criteria evaluate in order, and stop as soon as one matches. Once a ticket meets a criteria’s filter, its action fires and no later criteria are evaluated for that run.
An Always Criteria is a criteria with no filter attached, so it always evaluates as true. It acts as a breakpoint: nothing after it gets evaluated, since it always matches first. A criteria that has no action behaves the same way: once its filter matches, evaluation stops there even though nothing happens, because there’s no action to run.