What are Automations?
A plain-language introduction to AppGram Automations — what they do, how they're built, and the lifecycle from idea to live workflow.
Automations in a nutshell
Automations run multi-step workflows automatically whenever something happens in your project. The shape is always the same: when an event fires, do these things — call an API, send a webhook, post to Slack, draft a reply with AI, or branch down a different path depending on the data.
You'll find them under Automations in the main navigation.
What you can do with them
- React to product activity — a new feature request, a status incident, a published release, a survey response, and more.
- Reach other tools — send signed webhooks, generic HTTP requests, emails, or messages to Slack, Discord, Teams, and Telegram.
- Add intelligence — classify, extract, translate, or chat with an AI model as part of the flow.
- Make decisions — branch on conditions, loop over lists, and stop a run early when something isn't right.
How an automation is built
Every automation has three parts:
- A trigger — the event, schedule, or manual action that starts a run.
- An optional condition — a check that decides whether the run continues.
- One or more steps — the actions, executed in order from top to bottom.
You assemble all of this on a visual canvas called the builder, where the trigger and every step appear as connected nodes.
The lifecycle of an automation
- Create — open the builder, pick a trigger, and chain steps together.
- Set up — fill in URLs, secrets, and any placeholder values.
- Test — simulate an event and watch the run play out before it goes live.
- Enable — flip the switch so real events start triggering it.
- Monitor — review runs and step logs to confirm it behaves as expected.
The rest of this guide walks through each stage in order — start at the top and work down.
Next
Continue with Touring the automation builder to learn where everything lives on the canvas.
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