Below is a glossary of terms for Automate. Click on the word to drop it down and see more details on it.

  • Alerts can be triggered from monitors. They do things like trigger scripts, email people, or raise alerts.
  • Dataviews allow quick access to information about several machines at once. Such as list of software installed, or processor type. They are quick to pull up and customize, so they work better than searches for quick information lookups, but are limited in the types of data they can pull.
  • The Dashboard is where you can find many system configurations for CWA. There's a lot in the Dashboard, so exploring around is a good idea. It's where you create EDFs and set their default state. You can also set CWA's retention policies, and a whole lot more.
  • FasTalk speeds up the frequency of checking on a machine. The default is 5 minutes, but while FasTalk is on, it goes to 5 seconds. This is great when running scripts or commands.
  • Groups allow you to group together computers in divisions of your own making instead of the predefined simple one of client/location. You can tie them to searches to automatically populate the group. A group can automatically add monitors or schedule scripts to computers in it. Great for making sure applictions are installed and setup correctly, or all servers of a specific type have a specific monitor on them.
  • Internal Monitors check the CWA database for computers matching a specific state, and can trigger an alert. Internal Monitors differe from Remote Monitors because Internal Monitors only see things from the perspective of the CWA server. If a computer isn't sending it's data back to the server, the Internal Monitor wont be able to see the change in state. Useful when CWA is already collecting the data you need, meaning no extra work needs to be done the target machines.
  • Agents marked as master are normally servers. They check in more frequently, and are often automatically targeted for certain monitors
  • Maintenance Mode comes with two options, to stop alerts and to stop scripts, and of course both at the same time. This is to ensure that during maintance work automatic alerts aren't blowing up the ticket system or an oncall tech.
  • Network Probes are agents at a location that are used for network scanning, automatic agent deployment, and SNMP checks.
  • Remote Monitors allow you to regularly check a machine for a status update. Remote Monitors differ from Internal Monitors because Remote Monitors run on the target machine, so if you set a Remote Monitor to check a registry key, every check will happen on the machine itself, not from the CWA server. Remote Monitors can trigger alerts, using them it means that a failing monitor could trigger a script that fixes the issue.
  • Roles categorize machines with a simple yes/no answer. Is this server a mail server? Does this machine have BitLocker on? Is RDP enabled? Roles can be used in searches and scripts. They don't update often, but for information that changes rarely they are very powerful and simple to setup.