As your organization matures and expands, you will likely find yourself trying to address the common challenges that most organizations face during these moments of growth. One of these common challenges is having a siloed IT infrastructure, where all of your systems are functioning independently and you, the IT admin or IT group, are solely responsible for operating each system and maneuvering essential data from one to the next. In short, your day is filled with manual, often menial and even uninspiring work that chews up time you\u2019d otherwise spend driving larger, proactive and interesting projects. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
In this basic level walk through, we will cover some entry level automations that you can start with today within your JumpCloud account. As a cloud-based directory platform with a robust API framework, you can leverage many of the automation tools out there, and they all bring a certain level of functionality depending upon what you want to accomplish. Tools like Zapier<\/a>, Workato<\/a>, Integromat<\/a> and Tray.io<\/a> are some robust webhook platforms. What\u2019s nice is you can usually demo these solutions before leveraging their features, and I would suggest playing with a few of them to see which one solves your specific need.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Webhooks are used to create communication between two different applications based on events or triggers. When an event happens in an application, it processes that event and sends the data to an API endpoint that can accept this data. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
An API, or Application Programming Interface, is an intermediary endpoint between two applications. This allows an application to make POST, GET, UPDATE and sometimes even DELETE requests to an application and exchange data. It\u2019s a great way for applications to communicate and to automate with one another. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Let\u2019s take a real world scenario, such as user onboarding, to find a way to automate some of the more repetitive tasks that might consume our day. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Say you are in an organization where HR typically generates new employee tickets for IT to get their technology needs setup before their start date. That workflow probably looks something similar to this:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
You would then need to follow those same steps in reverse order for user offboarding. In a growing organization where you may see multiple new hires a week (and possibly some departures as well), this can cause a lot of overhead and opportunities for something to be missed. By automating some of these tasks, you could both simplify the process as a whole while also reducing the potential for error which could spiral into additional troubleshooting and time spent, not to mention security risks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In this case, we can use a triggered event (webhook) to send out user data from HR to JumpCloud (via an API). From there, you can assign the user to a device and groups to provision access into your SAML or SCIM applications. The amount of time dedicated to onboarding is drastically reduced by simply having the user automatically created within JumpCloud.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For this walkthrough, I will be showing how to use Google Sheets to create a User in JumpCloud. As a practical solution, you could have this Google Sheet filled out through a Google Form, or even populated by another integration from your ticketing system. This data will be collected by an automation tool (in this case we will be using Integromat) and then sent to JumpCloud in a JSON format in order to create a user. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Let\u2019s get started!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I will be using Google Sheets for this since that is pretty generic, but you will want to use whatever data source you have. Even an HRIS platform can be used for this if it allows for either a webhook or API calls. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The first thing you want to do is create an import template. You can do this simply by downloading the CSV Template from your JumpCloud admin console.<\/p>\n\n\n\n