When an Azure Function kept failing at Enable Resource Group, automation engineer Josh Ricketts found a built-in Rewst option he didn't know existed — and it changed how his team thinks about automation across the whole business.

Josh Ricketts, Automation Engineer, Enable Resource Group

The problem: a flaky Azure Function

My name is Josh Ricketts. I'm an automation engineer and I work at Enable Resource Group. We had an Azure function that we've been using for some automation and it was starting to get flaky. We were having issues with just downtime and requiring this function to get restarted over and over again multiple times a day. And so we were trying to figure out a way to move off.

The fix: Wait for Results on the webhook

We'd already been using Rewst for so many so many other automations already, but we couldn't figure out with what it was doing how to get the data that function was pulling from our documentation system back to an endpoint so that it could take action there with PowerShell. And so we were trying to figure out how to get that data back and we finally asked RoboRewsty like, "We can't figure out how to do this." And he was like, "Oh yeah, you can just use a wait for results on the webhook response and it'll send that result back to the endpoint rather than you having to figure out some other way to handle that."

And that just made we didn't have to deal with any kind of like extra infrastructure. Just, "Hey, this one little checkbox that we used to did not know about." It opened that right right up to us. So it's it was awesome.

Zooming out: automating beyond the help desk

You know, a lot of times us having engineering backgrounds, we would end up focusing on help desk or device automation or user account automation and all these tech things and kind of lose sight of the company and the business as a whole. And so we've started talking more to leadership in the company, leadership in different areas of the help desk or over finance and been able to find areas that we've been able to automate and move the business forward as a whole rather than just our technology part of our business.

Advice for other automation engineers

So if another automation engineer from another was starting with Rewst, I think what I would probably tell them is to focus on the little stuff.

Look for small wins, small automations, get your feet wet in something simple. Those little things sometimes have been some of the little ones have been some of our biggest impact automations we've built in our team and they're a great way to like scale too. So as you build these build these small automations a lot of times not just not just the knowledge that you learn from doing it goes forward, but sometimes you can really even reuse those same things or parts of it in new automations that you build down the line.