ConnectWise Automate: Agent Template & Effective Policy

This video covers what ConnectWise Automate agent templates are and how they are applied. It also shows how to audit where templates are coming from and what they are doing.

Step by Step:

1. Today we are going to be talking about agent templates what they are and how they effectively get applied to your computers.
2. So let’s go to automation à templates and à agent templates.
3. This is going to pull open a list of every agent template in your Automate system. (your list is going to look different than mine does)
4. Let’s talk about what an agent template does what is it used for.
5. To do this let’s double click on one of these just to open it up and see the settings.
6. An agent template is essentially a collection of settings that you apply to your remote Automate agents and the number one thing to understand is that the Automate agent is meant to operate off of multiple agent templates that are applied in a layered type of way.
7. There’s a priority system that in play here that determines which settings from which templates actually get applied.
8. So out of the box and Automate typically there is a template that’s called default that gets applied to every Automate agent and that acts as a baseline and it specifies the critical settings such as the server address that the Automate agents check into and are phoning home to.
9. Then on top of that you have your managed 24×7 template which out of the box is usually set up to specify some branding settings such as the tray text. So what is the tray text that appears when you hover over the Automate agent in the system tray, you can also specify the name of the service in the system so that you can white label ConnectWise Automate for your customers to display the name of your business instead of ConnectWise.
10. You can also specify a custom tray icon which is just a good bit of branding to help white label the product even further.
11. So that’s the number one thing to understand is that you’re operating basically off of a baseline template and then other templates are coming into play based on whether or not their settings are enabled and we’ll demonstrate this a little bit further here in just a few.
12.  I want to really quickly run through this enable checkbox.
13. If we wanted to use this template to specify custom trade text we could come in here and type in custom trade text just like this and so long as this checkbox is checked and no other template with the higher priority is coming through and specifying this setting by way of having this checkbox enabled this is going to be the winning setting that ultimately gets applied.
14. If your template has a setting in it that has this filled in box with the dash through it this essentially means this is disabled on this template specifically use any other template that has this setting applied to it to determine what is actually going to win out for this setting.
15. Whether or not the icon gets shown on the tray is going to be determined by another template that may or may not have that setting specified.
16. So how do templates actually get applied to machines – that is done with the group system in Automate which is essential to how Automate works across the entire program.
17. For example, if we go to all agents here this is going to show how the default template that we were talking about out of the box gets applied to all computers that are a part of this group and the priority that it gets applied with.
18. Now when it comes to priorities you got to think golf scores the lower the priority number the higher the priority it is. So by default all agents are getting the default template with the priority of seven.
19. In your environment out of the box your default template is probably being applied with a priority of 10 so that any other template that you create with custom settings and apply via a group can come through and overwrite the default settings if you’ve gone and specified anything that overwrites those.
20. Now to get a good idea of what is actually effectively happening in your environment the best way to do that is by double clicking any of your agents, opening up the computer management screen and then I’m going to show you one of the most important and useful tabs in your system period.
21. You’re going to click on the gear icon this is your automation tab, you’re going to come down here to this effective policy tile, and this is going to take a second to load because it’s essentially run out a bunch of SQL that is showing the relationship of all the different Automation in place and, in the effect of policy tab you can see a bunch of useful information if you’re ever wondering why did this monitor run? why did the script run? why is this happening on a recurring basis? this is going to show you all the different groups that this computer is a number of and what each of them is doing.
22. Today we are only concerned about the templates so let’s focus on that for now.
23. If we click on any one of these groups here and just Arrow key through them on the right-hand side you can see all of the different templates that are being applied and which group is responsible for applying those.
24. This is important because when you are looking to make a change to a template you want to know where you actually need to make that change at and whether something else is going to come through and overwrite that change.
25. If we look at the actual templates setting on the or tab on the left-hand side here we can see all five of the different templates. For example, applied to this machine the number which indicates the priority of the template and then at the very top this current computer config is going to show a list of all effective settings that are being applied.
26. So if we start here we can see all of the different settings that are ultimately controlling the remote Automate agent on this computer and we can scroll down through here see everything and if we pick and find the setting that we may want to modify it’s just a matter of going into each of these templates here and finding out which template specifically specifies that setting and that is going to show you ultimately what’s happening in your system and where you would need to go to theoretically make a change.
27. Hopefully this helps you out this is a very good way to audit what’s actually happening in your system and one of the more difficult things to wrap your brain around when you’re basically setting up the functionality of your remote Automate agents.