Automations

What the Automations panel is for

The Automations panel is a live view of the work the platform carries out on your behalf without anyone clicking a button. Every automated step recorded against a service lands here: provisioning a new service, suspending and unsuspending it, terminating it, recreating it, the individual stages of a bare-metal deployment, IP address allocations made during provisioning, options that need delivering by hand, and bulk hardware-inventory fetches. Instead of opening services one at a time, you open one panel to see what just happened, spot failures and retry them.

How to open it

The panel lives in the top header of the admin area, behind the lightning-bolt icon. On smaller screens where the header collapses, you reach it from the overflow menu (the three-dots icon) as the Automations row. Click the icon to open the dropdown; click anywhere outside it to close. It is available to every admin user.

A small numbered badge appears on the bolt when there is new activity since you last opened the panel. It counts the pending and failed runs of the last 24 hours, is red when any of them failed and amber when they are only pending, and reads 9+ above nine. Opening the panel clears it.

Reading the panel

The dropdown header shows the word Automations, a (24h) label, and a rolling 24-hour summary as coloured pills:

• Ok (green) — runs that completed successfully. This pill is always shown, even at zero.
• Pending (amber) — runs still in progress. Shown only when there is at least one.
• Failed (red) — runs that errored. Shown only when there is at least one.

Note: the pills count the last 24 hours, but the list below them is the 30 most recent runs whatever their age. On a quiet installation you will therefore see rows older than the window the pills describe. That is expected.

Each ordinary row shows:

What each element of an automation row means

Element	What it means
Status icon	A coloured icon on the left: green tick (Success), red cross (Failed), amber clock (Pending), or an amber refresh icon (Skipped, and Skipped in progress).
Name	The service name. If the service has no name of its own, the product name is shown instead; if neither is available it reads Unknown service.
Status badge	A pill on the right repeating the status in words: Success, Pending, Failed, Skipped or Skipped in progress.
Action line	The action that ran and which integration handled it, in the form “Action via Integration”.
Callback tag	A small blue Callback chip appears when the result came back from the provider afterwards rather than in the original exchange.
Timestamp	A relative time: Just now, 5m ago, 2h ago or 3d ago.
Error preview	Failed rows show the error message in red, trimmed to one line. Hover the text to read it in full.

Common tasks, step by step

Check that your automation is healthy

1. Click the bolt icon in the top header.
2. Read the 24-hour Ok / Pending / Failed summary at the top. No amber and no red pill means nothing needs your attention.
3. Scan the list for red Failed rows and read their inline error.

Retry a failed run

1. Find a row with a red Failed badge.
2. Click the circular-arrow retry button at the right edge of that row. It appears on failed rows only.
3. The platform re-runs the original action for that service and confirms with Provisioning retry triggered. A suspend is retried as a suspend, an unsuspend as an unsuspend, a terminate as a terminate, and a recreate as a recreate; everything else re-triggers provisioning.

Note: if another provisioning run for the same service is already in flight, the retry is skipped rather than duplicating the action. Before retrying, fix the underlying cause — most failures trace back to the integration that handled the action (wrong credentials, an unreachable endpoint, or a problem in its flow). Open that integration's connection settings, correct the issue, then come back here and retry.

Warning: a run that is Pending or Skipped has no retry button. Only failed runs can be retried from this panel; for anything else, act on the service itself.

Open the service behind a run

1. Click anywhere on an ordinary automation row except the retry button.
2. The panel closes and takes you to that service's detail page, where you can inspect its full history and act on it.

Rows that are not tied to a service — a bulk inventory fetch, for instance — do not navigate anywhere.

Bulk inventory fetches

When you run a bulk hardware-inventory fetch, it appears in the list as a Bulk Fetch Details entry marked with a drive icon rather than an ordinary service row. While it runs its badge shows the completion percentage and its icon spins.

Progress is shown as up to two bars:

• Step 1: Basic info — the first pass across all devices, with an X/Y device counter.
• Step 2: DIMMs, NICs, storage — the deeper pass that adds memory, network and disk detail to each device. This second bar appears once that pass begins.

A line beneath summarises the outcome so far: how many devices have been processed out of the total, plus counts of ok (green), partial (amber) and failed (red). When the job finishes it adds how long it took.

Inspect and retry failed devices

1. On a finished bulk-fetch entry that had failures or partial results, click View details — it names how many devices are behind it — to expand the per-device breakdown.
2. Each problem device is listed by name (and IP, where known) with the specific error in red or warning in amber.
3. If devices failed outright, a Retry N failed button appears. Click it to re-run the fetch for only those devices, leaving the successful ones untouched. A confirmation reads Retrying failed devices....

Recovering a locked bare-metal node

A bare-metal deployment can be blocked because the target node is still locked by an operation that is in flight. When that happens the row shows the Skipped in progress status together with an amber countdown pill, so you know whether to simply wait. It reads Auto-clears in Nm while there is time left (about ten minutes from the attempt), Auto-clears in <1m in the final minute, and Lock expired — retry now once the window has passed.

1. If you can wait, do nothing — when the countdown reaches zero the lock clears on its own and you can retry the deployment.
2. If the countdown has expired, or you need to unblock urgently, click the Force recover link next to the countdown.
3. The node is driven back to an available state and a confirmation appears. You can then retry the deployment.

Warning: Force recover is an escape hatch — use it only when the node is genuinely stuck. If the original operation is still legitimately working, let the countdown finish instead. The countdown and the link appear only on rows whose error is a node-lock conflict.

Live updates

The panel updates in near-real time: each time the platform records a new automation step the list refreshes within about a second, with no page reload. As a safety net it also re-checks roughly every 30 seconds, so it recovers on its own after a brief network interruption, and it always refetches the moment you open it. Bulk-fetch progress bars advance live while a job runs.

Tips and gotchas

• Empty panel — with nothing recorded, the panel reads No automation tasks yet. That is normal on a fresh installation, and normal for an installation that provisions everything by hand.
• A run stuck on Pending usually means a step is waiting on something outside the platform. Open the related service to investigate, correct the integration's configuration, then retry.
• The badge tracks “new” activity, not unresolved runs. Once you open the panel the counter clears, even if some of the runs shown are still pending or failed. Re-check the panel periodically rather than relying on the badge alone.
• Each run names the integration that carried it out. When something fails repeatedly, the fix almost always lives in that integration's connection settings or flow, not on this panel.
• This panel is not the audit trail. It shows automated provisioning work only. For who did what by hand, and when, use the Activity Log.

Related

Dashboard · Top Header & Global Search · Service Details · Inventory · Introduction to Plugins · Activity Log