# Automation

## Automation in Avantra

Automation is defined in Avantra as reducing the amount of human interaction that is needed to perform a task or activity that changes a monitored system in some way. This is to distinguish it from our monitoring capabilities, or Observe Automation where we automate your daily and real time checks to keep a system up and running.

For example, activities that automatically read and calculate the current status and performance of your SAP Jobs are best implemented as checks to give the full power of notification management, reporting and analytics we provide. Whereas starting new SAP Jobs or rerunning existing failed jobs are best implemented as an automation workflow to make use of the specific features of our automation engine, such as building upon the many built in and Step Library steps, track execution progress and combine manual and automatic tasks together.

The automation engine at the heart of Avantra is designed to provide you out of the box automation capability as well as allowing you design and deploy your own custom automations (even if you’re not a coding expert!).

- Automation engine overview

- Avantra provided automations (enterprise add ins)

- Building your own automations

- Execution, triggering and scheduling

In this section we will describe our automation engine in detail and how you can make best use of it in your Avantra.

| This function is only available with the Avantra Automation, Cloud and Enterprise Editions. For more information about editions please see the Avantra Editions Matrix.

## Core Components of Automation

We’ve defined a series of terms used to create an automation. Let’s look at each of them:

- Workflows

  We’ve introduced a new term above Workflows. This term is used to describe a series of steps that perform a task. A step can either be one of our Built in Steps, delivered as one of our Automation Templates, built yourself in JavaScript using our Step Library or be another Workflow itself. In this way, workflows are incredibly reusable for different tasks and purposes.

  See Workflows for more information.

- Steps

  Our Built in Steps perform commonly used tasks and allow access to the inner workings of Avantra without complex coding. They are often combined with custom JavaScript based Step Library steps to implement the desired logic.

  Steps have parameters that allow them to be configured and reused in different scenarios. There are many built in Parameter Types that can be chosen.

  See Built in Steps for more information.

- Namespaces

  Every automation object (workflow or step) in Avantra must be assigned to a Namespace. Namespaces allow for granular permissions to be applied to the workflows and steps that you build and import within Avantra. It is important to familiarise yourself with the Namespace concept as you get started with automating in Avantra.

  See Namespaces for more information.

- Automation Templates

  We supply pre-built Workflows and Step Library steps for common scenarios that our customers can download and use (depending on license installed). These pre-built items have their source code and configuration visible so our customers can copy and modify these for their own purposes.

  See Automation Templates for more information.

- Execution

  Executing, or Running Workflows is about how a workflow can be started, how it can be monitored and how manual operators can use workflows to drastically accelerate a complex task by offloading the repetitive work to Avantra.

  We support multiple methods for starting a workflow:

  - Manually from the Avantra UI

  - Automatically on a schedule

  - Automatically based on a notification in Avantra

  - By using our API

  See Running Workflows for more information.