Automation triggers and actions

Automations in InfraNest let you react automatically to things that happen across your infrastructure — this article covers what can start a rule, how to narrow when it fires, and what it can do once it runs. It's for anyone setting up or adjusting automations.

Overview

• A trigger is the single event that starts a rule, like a certificate expiring or a server being created.
• Conditions let you narrow a trigger down to only the events you care about.
• Actions are what the rule actually does — send a notification, open a maintenance window, update DNS, and more.

Choose a trigger

Every automation starts with exactly one event. Here's what you can pick from, grouped by area:

Domains

1. Watched domain registered
2. Domain expiring
3. Domain status changed
4. Domain renewed
5. Domain deleted

DNS

1. A DNS zone's records change
2. A specific record is created, updated or deleted
3. DNS record deleted — triggers whether it happened in InfraNest or at your DNS provider, one record at a time

Servers

1. Server added
2. Server status changed (powered on or off, rebooted, rebuilt, snapshot taken…)
3. Server removed

Monitoring and incidents

1. Monitor alert (up or down)
2. Incident opened
3. Incident resolved
4. Incident acknowledged
5. Incident note added, or a status update posted on it — from InfraNest, Slack, Telegram, an email, or PagerDuty

TipIf you only care about updates from one place — say, Slack — add a condition on Where it was done so the rule only fires for those.

Certificates

1. Certificate expiring
2. Certificate expired
3. Certificate changed
4. Weak certificate
5. Unexpected certificate (found via Certificate Transparency logs)
6. Renewal has not reached an address

Maintenance

1. Maintenance scheduled
2. Maintenance started
3. Maintenance completed

Drop Catch

1. Watched domain dropping soon
2. Watched domain registered
3. Watched domain available
4. Watched-domain registration failed

Dynamic IP and status pages

1. Dynamic IP changed
2. Status-page subscriber added

Narrow a trigger with conditions

1. In your automation, go to Conditions.
2. Click Add condition.
3. Choose a Field relevant to the trigger (for example, Days left, Status, Tags, or Network (ISP)).
4. Choose an Operator — such as equals, contains, greater than, or is one of.
5. Enter the Value to match against.
6. Repeat to add more conditions. Use Match to control whether Any or All of these conditions must be true.

Leave conditions empty to run the automation on every matching event.

NoteExample uses: a domain with fewer than 7 days left, a monitor that went down (not up), a specific DNS record type, or a particular tag on the affected object.

Add actions to a rule

An automation can run one or more actions, in order. Common ones include:

Notify and tag

1. Send notification — to your alert destinations, an email address, or Message a person.
2. Post under the incident's alert — replies in every Slack thread and Telegram message showing that alert.
3. Message a person — reaches them in Slack or Telegram, or by email if they have neither; you can target specific teammates or whoever PagerDuty says is on call.
4. Call webhook.
5. Add or remove Tags.

Monitoring and incidents

1. Start monitoring
2. Monitor the new website or Monitor the new server — these only add a monitor if your plan has room, so nothing existing gets paused.
3. Acknowledge incident or Resolve incident.

Maintenance and status

1. Open maintenance window or Complete maintenance.
2. Post status-page announcement.

Domains, DNS and certificates

1. Set nameservers.
2. Set auto-renew.
3. Create DNS zone or Apply DNS template.
4. Link certificate to a domain.
5. Stop tracking address — only works once nothing in your DNS answers for that address any more.

Integrations

1. Sync integrations.

To add an action: click Add action, choose it from the list, fill in its fields, then click Save automation.

Run an automation from Slack or Telegram

1. Make sure the automation's trigger is set to Manually.
2. In Slack, type /infranest run. In Telegram, send /run to the InfraNest bot.
3. Optionally add part of the automation's name to narrow the list.
4. Pick the automation you want from the results.
5. Confirm to run it.

It runs as you, using your role, and the result is posted back in the same chat.