What is automation? Follow

We've distilled some essential facts for you about automations. These are explained in greater detail in this article.

• Automations are time-based; they take action when a time-event occurs, not immediately after a ticket is created or updated.

• Automations run every hour, but not necessarily top-of-the-hour; they will start at some point during the hour.

• Your automations will always start running at the same time every hour.

• Automations do not run or fire on closed tickets.

• An automation must contain a condition that is true only once or an action that nullifies at least one of the conditions; otherwise, the automation will run in an endless loop.

• Automations, like all business rules, must be smaller than 65kb.

 

Here is a sample of automation that demonstrates one of the common uses:

This automation closes tickets 96 hours after they have been solved (96 hours is a support best practice for the minimum amount of time a ticket should remain in the solved state before it is closed). When the automation runs, any tickets that meet these criteria are closed. The close action looks like this:

Once a ticket is closed, it can't be modified anymore and automations no longer affect it.

This example also illustrates an important rule of automations: an automation must contain an action that cancels a condition. The ‘Status equals Solved’ condition is canceled by the ‘Status equals Closed’ action. If there were no canceling action, the automation would continue to fire in an endless loop because the status would remain solved (not closed) and continue to meet the condition criteria.