Weekend Thread Suggestion: What did you automate this week?
Posted by patchdayalert@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 18 comments
I’m honestly just interested in hearing about what you guys worked on automating this week. Could be some manual run thing that’s been on the back burner for some time. Could be an improvement to an already existing process.
Somehow, I’m feeling like my backlog has been reduced lately, which has given me some time to automate something that helps my boss know what my team and I have been up to throughout the week.
So what I did this week was had Copilot read through all of my emails, meeting transcripts, and notes and give me a one page summary. Then I created a skill in Claude Code that takes that summary and combines it with some stuff it pulls from our ticket and project management tools via MCP. Then it puts it all together in a nice .html file and converts it to PDF for me to send to my boss in an email before our 1-on-1.
What did you guys finally check off the todo list this week?
andyr354@reddit
I am mosty through automating new staff account creation. I'm still somewhat new to scripting and learning to think through all of the user classes and what security groups they get was an exercise.
There are some edge cases that always get a few out of the ordinary settings, but those will be in an email that goes out to the team to look over.
Leif_Henderson@reddit
Generating Wiz vulnerability finding reports. They only let me schedule 20 reports per week in the console but you can ad-hoc generate as many as you want. We have about 16 different groups responsible for some gcp subscription or another so I hit that limit a while ago and just got around to defining all the reports I'm pulling as API calls and scheduling them that way.
And aside from just telling the console to generate and download, I'm converting the csv to xlsx and building a pivot table, then uploading the file to SharePoint.
FarToe1@reddit
Gitea webhooks.
Personal tools that I used to commit a change, then ssh onto the host and run a git pull.
Installing the distro package of webhook and then connecting it to gitea was very easy, and now whenever I commit to a repo for any of a dozen or so psgi apps, they not only sync automatically to the target but also restart, all within 2 seconds of hitting the button.
nemor3@reddit
Finally got around to automating SSL cert and domain expiry checks across all client environments. Had a cron job doing it for a while but the alerts were going to one inbox that nobody watched consistently. Wired it up properly with Slack notifications this week - now it pings the right channel 30 days out, 7 days, and day-of. Caught two certs that were 9 days from expiring that nobody knew about.
Boring automation but the kind that saves a bad Monday morning.
AdeelAutomates@reddit
Automate my youtube video's timestamp after posting content. Always forget to mark them as I edit and by the time I post I dont even want to watch my video again to set the marks.
So I run APIs to youtube to collect the transcript and then send them to an LLM to timestamp it.
canadian_sysadmin@reddit
Did some simple but fun webhook automation, so end-users could kick-off various Azure logic apps and powerautomate flows via. simple web links.
This allowed us to easily allow end-users to run various advanced ERP server and app functions and azure stuff without needing to contact IT directly.
patchdayalert@reddit (OP)
That sounds pretty cool…the more self service, the better!
Baerentoeter@reddit
I finally got around to do some offboarding automation to go along with the onboarding automation. Now I can disable while departments or sites at once, let's hope I don't need that functionality soon.
patchdayalert@reddit (OP)
I’ve been putting off smoothing out our onboarding procedures for forever. We have hiring managers start off on a Sharepoint form that HR owns but never updates and it automatically sends an email to our ticket system. But then from there it goes off to one guy that handles manually provisioning accounts and a laptop for the new user.
It’s definitely not something that scales very well, but it’s held together for now. Unless that guy has to take time off, then we’re scrambling a bit.
Civil_Inspection579@reddit
Honestly that workflow sounds genuinely useful because it automates the “status reconstruction” problem instead of just summarizing text. Half the effort in weekly reporting is mentally rebuilding what actually happened across emails, meetings, tickets, and scattered notes.
patchdayalert@reddit (OP)
And that’s honestly the part that I struggle with personally. By the end of the week, I know I got a lot done, but it’s always tough for me to recall the details of things since I jump around so much.
EmperorGeek@reddit
We automated the “deletion” of Endpoint Management user accounts that had not been used in 180 days. The number of “But I need that account” tickets we got was amazing. They “Needed” their account that they had not used in over 180 days? I’m betting they don’t even remember how to use the product!!
Sure_Stranger_6466@reddit
I tried automating the process to make a music transcription service and failed terribly.
ohead70@reddit
Had a Session with Claude to do Syslog Analysis of all our Network and Firewall gear. Current state is a Claude playbook in markdown format that I can use together with the logs in a tar.gz file to let it do the work. It also offered me a python script but this is based on what it has seen in the logs so far - I prefer to do let it work through fresh files a couple of days to see if all my needs are met. Next step would be to use API calls instead of manual upload of playbook and logs.
patchdayalert@reddit (OP)
I do love how well it can parse logs for you. Used to give me such a headache trying to go through eyeballing iy
nimbleearnings_4@reddit
finally got a script to pull our backup logs and flag anything older than the retention policy, saves me like an hour of manual checking every week.
vogelke@reddit
That sounds very useful, as long as it doesn't read like AI wrote it.
patchdayalert@reddit (OP)
Oh Copilot totally does, tons of emojis and everything. That’s why I have Claude Code just use that info to make a real report. I still have to review the output obviously, but it gets everything surprisingly mostly right.