Automating the Mundane: “Boy, howdy, I don’t like doing this.”

Summary

In this episode of Automate IT, David van Heerden discusses automating tedious and frustrating tasks in IT. He introduces a workflow automation called Worklets on demand, which can be used with Automox's API and a ticketing system to automate endpoint user tasks. By automatically triggering the repair steps on the endpoint, the need for scheduling, remote desktop control, and manual troubleshooting is eliminated. This automation can be applied to various common troubleshooting tickets, making IT support more efficient.

Transcript

David van Heerden:

Alright, I apologize in advance to my editor for the quality of this video. I just moved, so I'm kind of hiding the mess behind me and working off of my laptop's microphone. So let's see how this goes.

All right, welcome to another episode of Automate IT brought to you by Automox. My name is David van Heerden. And today we're going to be talking about one of the things in IT that I dislike quite a bit, which I think is usually the best catalyst for implementing automation is "Boy, howdy, do I really don't like doing this. Let me find a way to never do this thing again."

And it really points to kind of kind of two bits, is, you know, to any of you listening who are in the help desk still in the it space, even as a manager or director, right? You still roll up your sleeves and get involved in a ticket. So I think it applies to a lot of us. but in general, the thing that is so tedious and painful to work through is your printer troubleshooting tickets and your intermittent Wi-Fi networking kind of tickets.

A huge pain, especially on the Wi-Fi bit of things because it's working fine or was working yesterday or it's working right now. But every time it goes down, you know, I can't call you guys or you're not available. my iPad works fine on the Wi-Fi. So there's clearly something wrong with this work laptop. Please, please help me fix it. And you're sitting there not really sure what to do, right?

Except to run through some logs that are very vague and unhelpful. And then you kind of just go through the same tedious process of disable, re-enable, uninstall and reinstall those drivers. Do the firmware updates, all the different little steps that you can do just to rule out that that laptop is not the issue. So that you can then point at the network possibly being a problem, which...

It rarely ever is, right? It's usually just something wonky on that Windows laptop that is causing you and that end user so much headache. And especially pointing back to the last four years for a lot of us with the adaptation of remote work, right, or hybrid work, where we have just a huge influx of laptops floating around, laptops that were rush ordered, manufactured maybe slightly less high quality because of the supply chain issues that we had around COVID era. And that we're experiencing an uptick in these kinds of hardware related issues. so yeah, Wi-Fi connectivity tickets, would say surface is probably the most frustrating things for me.

And one of the things that I built, I'm gonna shamelessly plug a workflow automation is what I'll call it that I built at Automox with Automox a few years back. I sort of labeled it as Worklets on demand. And so put that into Google: Worklets on demand, Automox, and you'll see a blog post there. I feel like I should refresh it before bragging about it a little bit more. But the gist of it, and I think it's something pretty cool to think about, even if it's not with Automox, I think it's something pretty unique to us, but you can definitely try to get it to work in other tools. But what you can do is use Automox's Worklets in conjunction with our API and your ticketing system to completely automate your endpoint user tasks.

So even if it's an admin user task on an endpoint, like uninstalling and reinstalling or driver disable, re-enable, right? The things that in user land only an admin should be able to do. You can avoid the entire scheduling back and forth, remote desktop control while they're on the cell phone and, the call me whenever it goes down again and I'll drop whatever it is I'm doing so I can talk you through it kind of thing.

You can forego that entire process and just have your ticketing system with Automox automatically run all of those repair steps on the endpoint for you, which I think is a pretty cool thing. So at a high level, I'll explain it as something where the ticket comes in and says, Wi-Fi is not working, right? Internet not working. Maybe they sent it from their cell phone because the laptop's currently broken or they can send it from their laptop because it only goes up and down every few minutes or something like that.

Regardless, what you can do with your ticketing system is say, okay, text in ticket, right? In the subject line or the description says Wi-Fi issues, laptops, right? Whatever the criteria you feel comfortable with on triggering this. And then your ticketing system can say, okay, I know the user that submitted the ticket. I know which hardware is assigned to that user.

So let me tell Automox to run the Wi-Fi repair or Wi-Fi troubleshoot worklet on this endpoint. And it'll just trigger and run it. And for the end user, their experience is that they submit the ticket. And again, let's assume that they've done it on the laptop. It's an intermittent Wi-Fi problem, or they've done it on their phone and it's currently offline. If that laptop, that device, that endpoint happens to check in online at any point in time, plugged into a dock and it gets ethernet or just intermittently goes down and comes back up randomly, the Automox agent will receive that push command, that worklet, near immediately when it checks in, and then it'll start running locally on the endpoint to say, okay, I'm gonna disable the adapter and re-enable it. I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna do that. And you can run through all these checks. Like these workloads can get very complex and robust, again, as much as you want them to be.

To operate on the endpoint and perform the simple stuff that you would have spent all this time wasting, performing on the endpoint with the mouse and keyboard can now just be fully automated between your ticketing system and with Automox. So again, look up the blog. It goes far into a technical deep dive with Fresh Service, which is a ticketing system that we're integrated with, and of course, Automox.

Let your imagination run wild with this because think of like I said earlier, the printer type issues, those really tedious, frequently asked, common endpoint troubleshooting tickets that you get, a Worklet can automate for you. And Automox by being a SaaS product on the cloud and being a cloud native product can integrate with those to automate these things. I wish I could show it off and demo it all right now for you, but again, I don't have my setup as I would like, so I can't, but check out that blog and definitely take a look at it.

And I know this whole thing kind of sounds like a big old plug, which I'm normally not a big fan of, but it's just the most concrete example that I have of how there's this frequent annoying thing because we're a remote company and I had no way of just getting a laptop and quickly fixing it. So that whole process of getting someone on the phone and scheduling and remote controlling was absolutely annoying enough to automate.

So thanks for listening. I hope you take a look and get some value out of that blog. And let me know what you think in our Automox community. Peace.