IT Automation: Boost Your IT Department with RPA

Introduction to RPA for IT Departments

Good day everyone and thank you for joining today's webinar where we will be discussing how Fortra's Automate RPA platform can provide a boost to your IT department.

My name is Dan Smith. I'm a senior solutions engineer here at Fortra specializing in automation.

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RPA for IT: Agenda

The topics for today include challenges facing IT departments, common use cases for RPA and IT, why automate for IT departments, a live automate demo, and we probably won't have time to answer your questions live, but we will respond to all questions that are posted after the webinar concludes.

Okay. Our first topic is challenges facing IT departments. Challenges and pressures on the IT department continue to grow with an increasing number of requests and day to day tasks. There's less time to invest in driving innovation and strengthening the value of the business. Many departments are also challenged with having fewer resources to handle these growing requests. Likely IT hasn't been considered as part of the organization's larger RPA initiative or the department has gaps in existing processes that are still being done manually that could be entirely automated with the help of our solution.

Cybersecurity initiatives are likely the number one priority for your IT team. We understand that as Fortra has a large cybersecurity portfolio alongside of automation, but automation can play an important and beneficial role as well.

By leveraging RPA for the most manual and tedious tasks pressed onto your IT team members, they can gain back efficiencies in processes and productivity and are enabled to focus on more strategic and high value initiatives.

Automate provides your IT employees digital coworkers to take on the manual and tedious tasks relieving IT teams from mundane operations.

Automate will allow your department to develop long lasting automation that is consistent and reusable, providing robotic process automation that also works for IT.

Common RPA Use Cases in IT

Now let's take a look at some common RPA use cases for IT. Keeping in mind, this is just a sampling of how our customers are leveraging RPA in their IT departments.

For example, IT policy and training that might include policy distribution and routing, tracking of IT training completion and scores.

Reporting may include creation of standard management reports, distribution of selected reports to various user groups, variance calculations and reporting versus plan data. Event management might include event monitoring and reporting. First level event resolution.

Application testing might include initial application performance testing, collection of user feedback, ratings, reporting of test results in various formats.

Security monitoring may include technical threat and vulnerability management, incident registration and reporting, first level incident resolution. Help and service desk management includes ticket creation and routing, request processing, logging, and updating, automated delivery of responses to frequently asked questions, automated preapproved task execution, automated escalation processing and routing, and after hours notification and alert processing.

File management including FTP, SFTP, and MFT would include batch processing and ad hoc file transfers, synchronizing, deleting, and emptying of folders, securing and encrypting data at rest and in motion, audit reporting, and centralized management of data flows.

Database processing may include automated data collection, replication, cleanup and migration.

Server application monitoring and remediation might include daily monitoring of server performance and capacity, automated email notifications of server issues, reporting of server performance and available drive space, cloud environment monitoring and usage. And user management and provisioning may include automating user profiles and setup, processing new and high level user requests, managing password reset processes and termination processing.

As a quick example, the IT team at World Precision Instruments is currently processing over one hundred accounting production and manufacturing resource planning reports through automate freeing the IT staff from waiting around during the evening to run those close of business and end of month reports. I also want to highlight the quote we received from their IT support specialists.

I'm not a programmer, but with Automate, I don't need to be. I taught myself to use the program and there is almost no learning curve.

Why Choose Automate RPA for IT

So why Automate for IT departments? Automate was built with IT in mind. Automate provides organizations an easy to use automation solution built for IT. IT teams can build automation quickly for critical tasks so your team can have better productivity and efficiency and enable faster execution of automation projects.

With enterprise features that are top of mind for IT leaders, Automate acts like full time employees, but on a digital scale, working twenty four hours a day. Here are the key features of Automate. It allows users to build automation quickly, leveraging reusable modules, easily test and troubleshoot and have everything centralized, avoiding compiled code.

Reducing the technical expertise required to build great and durable automation is where automate excels. Taking a look at the breadth of features, you'll see four main categories here. Automate has a built in recorder that assists with building out UI automation, whether that's browser based or a desktop application.

Native actions are well over seven hundred actions that can be leveraged to integrate with various systems. We also have built in API integration for RESTful APIs or SOAP based web services, as well as decoding the XML or JSON within the responses. And we also have artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities.

Regarding access to automate know how, Fortra provides well over two hundred task modules that are free to download from Fortra's digital marketplace, including FTP, file manipulation, integration with active directory, Jira, ServiceNow, and Zendesk, just to name a few. We also have the Automate Academy, which provides do it yourself videos for training.

We also have the automation community where you can share knowledge with other peers and it provides peer to peer support. We also have an in house professional services team that can provide more official training through certification training and can also help you build out the automation.

It's important to recognize that each enterprise IT automation journey is unique, whether the automation is going to include back end automation, working with APIs or front end automation, working with various UIs or running your processes in an attended or an unattended fashion after hours. All of these capabilities are built into the automate license.

Understanding Automate's Architecture

Now let's take a quick look at the architecture components of automate. It begins with the development tools, which we also refer to as the studio. That's where you design, build, and test your automation.

The system has a centralized server that communicates with the studios as well as our Automate agents. You would place an agent on a system and the execution of the logic would take place on that particular system. Then we also have the mobile ops console where you can monitor and control what's happening inside of the automate system without actually being inside of the development tools.

These components can be combined in various ways. This is a sample package called Automate Plus that contains two studios and five agents to be deployed on various systems.

It's easily scalable. Additional studios can be added a la carte as well as the agent licenses. And you can also incorporate an or a Doctor instance by adding another server.

Here's a snapshot of the core built in actions available with an automate. There are well over seven hundred actions and sub actions that can be leveraged to build out automation. A few notable ones include active directory database email, FTP, which includes SFTP and FTPS, browser integration, whether that's Chrome, Edge, or Firefox, HTTP for integrating with APIs, And there's also VB scripts. You can incorporate DLL's, Python scripts, executables, PowerShell scripts if you'd like. All the built in actions should cover everything that you need to build out the automation, but we wanna make sure that we provide, flexibility when building out the automation.

RPA Workflow Design and Execution

Automate contains multiple triggering mechanisms, including a regular schedule, folder watcher, and an inbox monitor, just to name a few. Essentially, once a task is built, you apply a trigger or multiple triggers in order to activate it and prepare it for production.

Automates workflow designer can be leveraged to design an automated business process. In this particular example, we have a workflow that is executing every day at three in the morning, leveraging a schedule trigger.

It then reaches out to an FTP server and downloads a file via SFTP.

It takes that file, which is a CSV file, manipulates the data, creating a new Excel spreadsheet.

It then encrypts and uploads the resulting file to another FTP server, at which point it sends out a proactive notification letting an administrator know that the process has completed successfully, sending out an associated email. It also has exception handling built in. If a failure occurs anywhere in the process, it will then reach out to an API, in this case, a ServiceNow API, to open up incident. The system will automatically load balance.

It is going to choose an agent to execute the logic based on the prod agents or the production agents grouping. The system monitors CPU load so it knows which one has the most bandwidth to be able to execute the process. You can then stay, with that same agent throughout by choosing the previous agent's designation, or you can go right back into the pool of prod agents to have a different system execute the logic. So the workflow design is essentially flexible in regards to which system is going to execute at any given time.

Next, we'll take a look at this workflow in action.

Within the workflow designer, we can test the entire process end to end by clicking on the run icon here.

And then we will get an indicator box that appears in the lower right that's indicating that the process has begun. It is now downloading a file from the FTP server via SFTP.

Then it's taking that resulting file, manipulating it, putting the data into the proper format, leveraging some filtering mechanisms here. I can interact with the system here moving the windows accordingly so we can see the proper output.

Now you'll see that the data has filtered, creating that new report.

The next step, it will encrypt and upload the file to another FTP server.

And once that completes, the system will then send out a notification to the administrator via email in this case that the process completed successfully. We could also practically notify an administrator if there was any sort of a failure that occurred throughout the entire flow. We also have exception handling built in that would open up an incident in ServiceNow through its API. If there was any sort of an exception that occurred, we can track the output in the lower window here and track any sort of variables that are being passed throughout the entire process. All that can be monitored throughout the entire execution of the test.

Now, I'll run another test. This time we have deactivated the FTP server. So, when we click on the Run icon here, we'll now see that it's attempting the FTP download, which is going to fail. It will take the failure branch, which will create an incident in ServiceNow making a call to the API.

The system is aware of all the exception, information, the particular action that caused the failure. All that information can then be incorporated into that ServiceNow ticket.

Now let's take a look at the task that was incorporated in that workflow. You can open up that particular task inside of the automate task builder. This is where you have access to all of those seven hundred plus actions that you can simply drag into your logic and complete the associated form. You can design and build your logic for the individual task in this component, and you can test it as well.

So you'll see various actions here. Take a look at the logic at the top. We're creating and initializing some variables. We can put in a collapsible region to make it easier to read.

And then we are creating a new workbook from an existing template. So you see this is also self documenting in a sense. We are then opening up an existing workbook and extracting the data to a dataset. So we're grabbing all of that text regardless of how many rows there are. We are looping through that dataset, adding specific rows to the new workbook, creating that new report.

And then finally, we have a wrap up section where we're closing and saving those particular workbooks. Let's run a quick test inside of the task builder. I'll click on the run icon here.

Now we'll see the task executing from the top down, creating the new workbook based on the templates. It's now opening up the report.

It's going to be the source of the new report.

Now you see all the information being written. You'll see it looping through all the data in the background, then finally saving and closing that report. So you can test out each one of these modules individually inside of the task builder. You can also test these out as you saw before with the inside of the workflow designer, out the entire process end to end.

Logging and Troubleshooting in Automate

One of the more common questions I get is around logging. So how easy is it to troubleshoot if you have some sort of an exception? Like we've seen here, you can easily go into the task builder or the workflow designer to simulate a particular failure. And you can build out proactive notification as you've seen. But also you can incorporate the creation of custom logging. By default, the system for compliance purposes doesn't log all the information that is extracted or derived throughout the entire process. But you can incorporate custom logs throughout the entire the entire flow of the particular automation.

And if I run this one here where we're executing an SSIS package, this one in particular, I know this one's going to fail. And we built in some logic to write out the information in the event of a failure to write that out to a custom log and then send that out to the administrative, the administrator proactively so they are easily able to, first off, know that there is an exception that occurred and what that particular exception is. You'll see it is popping the log to the screen here. Of course, this wouldn't take place outside of a demo.

This is the information that would be sent via email to the administrator so they can quickly determine what that particular exception is. They'll know exactly when it occurred. And as we mentioned too, you'll know, you can incorporate timestamps without, throughout the entire process. So you can see that the automate task had initiated.

We connected to the database successfully, and we see that the updates were completed. But initiating that SSIS package, we'll then see that we did receive a particular failure and is indicated by the DTSCR failure error message. And that was what triggered the customized logging of the data and the transmission of that particular email.

API Integration Capabilities

Another common question is around API integration. How easy is it to integrate with various APIs?

And we have built in functionality to integrate with either RESTful APIs or SOAP based web services. In most cases, you'll probably be integrating with RESTful APIs. So we have the built in HTTP action. You can simply drag in either a GET or a POST. You're really following along with the documentation and then filling out the form accordingly related to the URL that you're going to call, any sort of credentials, as well as, the advanced settings like content type, any sort of header information.

Again, you're just really following along with the documentation.

And then if we run a test on this particular service here, this o data has an actual sample request that will get a valid response. I'll run that one right from here.

And then we can put in some dialog boxes, some pop ups with some information that was extracted from the resulting JSON.

We can also take a look at the individual object that was returned. The JSON string can be easily converted to an object where we can grab the various data elements from it. We can inspect the object that was created using the built in actions.

We can drill into exactly the information that we're looking for, maybe email information, address information. You saw the city name was popped to the screen.

So we can identify exactly where this information resides. I can right click and copy the value or the path directly from here. So it makes it really easy to determine what that particular path is so you know exactly what syntax to use when you are displaying the information to the screen or writing the information out to a log.

Building Parallel Processing RPA Workflows

Now that you've seen how the task builder works and how you can design and build your individual tasks, we're kinda taking a look back at the workflow designer here, and wanted to show you how that you can actually build out parallel processing.

This particular workflow is monitoring an inbox, waiting for a particular invoice to appear.

It also, in parallel, has a file watcher assigned to a particular folder watching for any sort of invoices that may be added to that shared folder ad hoc. Either way, in either condition, we have some file validation and sorting taking place before the system passes the documents over to a shared folder where the intelligent capture component, the enhanced OCR capabilities that incorporates artificial intelligence and machine learning. In which case after the data has been extracted, it can in parallel update the ERP system, maybe move the documents, the original documents and the resulting reports over to a document management system, as well as creating an Excel report and sending that out via email. So that can all be contained here inside of this particular workflow.

As you would imagine, anytime you make a change to any one of these individual tasks that are represented by the gray icons, it'll automatically update any of the workflows where these modules are utilized. These modules are reusable. Whether you've built these yourself or you've downloaded these from the digital marketplace that were built out by, professional services. Either way, when you incorporate those modules into these workflows, it's actually creating a link to the task. So the tasks are maintained in a separate or in a centralized database where they are utilized by multiple workflows.

Monitoring Automate RPA Workflows

And I'd say the most common question is related to monitoring the automate software when you've got workflows and tasks that are executing automatically based on triggering mechanisms.

You would not have to necessarily be inside of the Automate Studio, those development tools to monitor what's happening inside the system. It does have audit reports, but you can actually monitor the system through a mobile ops console. This is browser based. You would log in using your automate credentials.

We have role based security built into the system. So not everyone would have administrative access, of course. And these individual users can be restricted to what they can execute, not only inside of the development tools, but also from this mobile ops console. So they would leverage those same set of credentials.

Role-Based Security in Automation

And from here, you can see upcoming activity. If, the automation is based on a schedule, You'll see active instances that's in the middle column there. You'll see anything that's actively executing.

And you'll also see on the right recent activity, prior execution, whether that was successful or if it had failed or if it was able to resolve itself through retries, you'll also be able to monitor that as well in the recent activity column. For the active instances, you do have the capability based on the role based security, those permissions, whether you you could disable an active instance, you could stop it, pause it, check the history, see where it is used to be able to assist you with the troubleshooting, based on any sort of failures you see in recent activity.

Interacting with the Automation API

So again, if you have the proper permissions, you would have those capabilities to interact with the system directly. From here, you can also leverage the automate API. This system is actually leveraging those metrics methods through the Automate API to be able to pull this information. But you can also leverage the Automate API to trigger any sort of workflows and tasks from any sort of third party software.

You can also utilize this mobile ops console for creating custom dashboards as well. So it's not just limited to the automate system. You can tap into third party databases and APIs as well. So it's very flexible in that regard. And again, this allows you to avoid, accessing the Automate software tools directly. You can monitor this from your, from your from your cell phone or from any sort of a browser on any one of the given systems that you're monitoring the software.

Revision Management Features

I also want to point out that the automate software has built in revision management. So if you did need to revert back to a prior version of a task or a workflow, can do that directly inside of the development tools as long as you have the proper permissions to be able to do so.

Before we wrap up, I wanted to give you a quick look at Fortress Digital Marketplace. You've heard me mention that a few times. This is where the over two hundred prebuilt modules for automate reside. These are maintained by professional services.

So you can use these. They're meant to be used as plug and play modules, but you can definitely utilize these for training or for reference. A lot of these are driven by APIs. So, integrating with APIs.

So they're great to use for reference. I'll scroll through all of these connectors. The vast majority are free to download. There are a few that are deemed solution bots that do typically require some professional services because there may be various versions that the system integrates with.

So we typically incorporate some professional services hours. But otherwise, the vast majority, well over two hundred of the two sixteen that are in there are free to download. You simply target the module that you're looking for. For example, ServiceNow open new incidents. Click on that and add it to your cart and download it. Some of these come with videos that you can, you can get a preview of exactly what the, the task is going to do once downloaded here. So, it makes it really nice and easy and convenient to build out your automation.

Utilizing Prebuilt Modules for Automation

And anytime that I'm looking to build out any new automation, the very first place that I start with is the digital marketplace, just to see what's already been built out there. And this is evolving every quarter. You'll see more and more modules added to this digital marketplace.

We're almost out of time. We just scratched the surface really on the capabilities of the Automate RPA platform. Definitely check out our RPA videos site for additional ideas related to use cases.

The sky's really the limit of what you can build out using this system. It really truly is a Swiss army knife regarding its capabilities, but the RPA use cases will give you some additional ideas. Definitely make sure you post your questions to the chat window.

Conclusion and Next Steps

We will get back to you after the conclusion of the webinar with those answers.

And with that, thank you so much for joining today and have a great rest of your day.