How many automations/remediations does the 1E Platform have?
I get asked that question quite a lot. It seems like a simple question… and if we were a simple platform which was reliant on running powershell scripts or similar, that question may be easier to answer—but the 1E Platform was built for automation. You can combine “fragments” of functionality in a no-code rule builder to react to almost any circumstance in almost any way imaginable—and if there isn’t a fragment to fit your needs, you can create new ones for very specific purposes with ease.
There are 2x types of primary “DEX Objects” (digital employee experience) in the platform, Instructions and Rules.
Instructions are run by humans—via the 1E UI, or through API calls from ServiceNow, a Chatbot or self-service portal, or even a desktop icon click—it could be an end-user, service desk agent or IT admin running an instruction on one, many or all devices.
Rules are autonomous automations, typically triggered by an event: a process starting or crashing, a service changing state, a file updating, a registry change, a user logging in, a USB device being connected to a port, time passing—almost anything! Rules can be of type “Check” – which report on the status of something as being compliant or not compliant with the rule; or “Fix” which “self-heal” and enforce a required configuration/setting.
There are thousands of remediations available. Out of the box there are somewhere around 300 instructions deployed when a new instance is spun up, and 50-60 automation rules. Instructions are grouped into Sets and it’s common to have 600 – 800 instructions at the end of the first year of use.
It’s best practice to only deploy instructions which are relevant to your environment. Several hundred are available on the 1E Exchange, but most of those are limited to globally applicable instructions. Many thousands more exist which are specific to a given technology or customer environment. Customers can also create their own with ease. Either by modifying an instruction from the Exchange or base sets, starting with a PowerShell script, or leveraging SCALE, the in-built language of the 1E Client.
To give you an idea of what a fully set-up environment looks like, here’s a listing from one of our demo labs—you can see the set names, the number of instructions per set, and the contents of the first set below:
Rules are bundled into Policies and made up of a trigger and one or more fragments. A fragment is a precondition, check, or fix. These are combined to make rules and you can build your own rules in a no-code fashion with a rule builder.
Most fragments take parameters. As such, it’s super easy to build a rule that, for example, has a “precondition” of a certain piece of software being installed which is “triggered” when a named registry key changes and “checks” a specific registry value. If its not required it’ll “fix” the value to the required value. That same demo environment has 316 fragments, which make up 211 rules (but could be leveraged into an infinite number of combinations!) Those rules are split across 20 policies—all of which you can see below.
Rule builder:
Rules:
Policies:
So, despite the complex response to a simple question, the base fact is that there’s almost no limit to the number of remediations. This is because of how the 1E Platform is built; it isn’t reliant on a limited set of scripts. You can combine fragments into new rules at will and people write new instructions every day. And while there’s no specific answer to the question, “how many automations/remediations does the 1E Platform have?”, to give you the short answer – thousands!
