Yaw Boateng
There are two ways to make a runbook in Infragrid. You can describe the job to Griddy in chat, and it drafts the runbook for you. Or you can record yourself doing the job once, which saves a Guide, and then create a runbook from that Guide.
Both paths end in the same place: a runbook you can test, publish and put on a schedule. What changes is where you start, and that depends on whether the job is easier to say or to show.
Is the job easier to say or to show?
Here’s a quick test. Imagine explaining the job to a colleague who has never seen it. If two or three sentences would be enough for them to do it, describe it. If you’d end up saying “here, let me just show you,” record it.
| Describe it | Record it | |
|---|---|---|
| Where you start | A message to Griddy in chat | Record guide, in Guides |
| Good fit | Work in connected apps, with rules you can state | Clicking through sites or apps you’d rather show |
| What you get first | A draft runbook | A Guide: steps with screenshots |
| What comes next | Test, publish, schedule | Create runbook, then the same |
Describe it: one message in chat
Describing works best when the job lives in apps you’ve connected and you can name the rules. Say you post a weekly summary of finished engineering work:
Every Monday at 9, find the Linear issues closed last week, group them by project, and post a short summary in #eng-updates.
Griddy looks up the connected apps and accounts the job needs, writes the steps, and saves a draft runbook. The draft shows up in the chat as a card that tells you how far along it is: Draft, Validated, not tested, Tested or Ready. From the card you can open the runbook and read or edit every step.
Write the request the way you’d hand it to a person. Include the timing, the sources, where the result goes, and anything it should leave alone. Whatever you leave out, Griddy has to guess or ask about.
Record it: do the job once
Recording suits work that’s hard to put into words: a supplier portal with no connected app, a form where the order of fields matters, a report you build by clicking through three screens. For example, say that every month you download last month’s invoice from a supplier’s billing portal and file it in a shared Finance folder.
- Open Guides and choose Record guide.
- Choose what to record. Pick screens, applications or individual windows.
- Do the job once, at your normal pace. If you need to step away, pause and resume from the Notch.
- Finish recording. Infragrid prepares the steps, writes a title and description, and saves the screenshots.
The result is a Guide: step-by-step instructions with screenshots from your recording. A Guide is useful by itself, too. You can share it with a teammate who needs to learn the task.
From a Guide to a runbook
A Guide shows how the work was done. To have the work run on its own, open the Guide and choose Create runbook. That saves a draft runbook linked to the Guide and opens a chat where Griddy starts making it reusable.
Griddy treats your recording as an example of the task. Values that change from run to run become named inputs, so the invoice month becomes something you fill in each time. Incidental steps, like signing in or switching tabs, are left out. Where a connected app can do a step the same way, Griddy may use that app and tell you about the swap. If the recording doesn’t settle something, such as which of two similar folders to use, it asks.
In that first conversation, Griddy saves the draft and reports what’s ready and what still needs setup. It doesn’t test, publish or switch on the runbook yet.
The runbook keeps its link to the Guide revision it came from. The editor marks it Made from a recorded guide, Open guide takes you back to the recorded steps and screenshots, and the Guide itself stays as you saved it.
After either path: test, publish, schedule
From here the two paths are the same. You have a draft runbook, and three steps take it to running without you:
- Test the draft. Use Test draft in the editor, or ask Griddy to test it in chat. Open the test to see what each step did.
- Publish. If this exact draft hasn’t completed a test, you’ll see a warning before it goes live.
- Schedule or deploy. A published runbook can run on a schedule or start from a trigger, such as an event in a connected app. Either way it runs in Infragrid’s cloud, so your Mac can be closed. A runbook that only uses connected apps needs no browser. One with browser steps runs in a cloud browser signed in with one of your browser profiles.
Later edits stay as unpublished changes until you publish them, and earlier versions are kept, so you can always see what changed.
Pick one job to start
If you’re still unsure, go back to the colleague test. Weekly, rule-based work across connected apps makes a good first description. A monthly chore in a portal you click through from memory makes a good first recording.
Either way, start with one job you already do on a schedule. Download Infragrid, then describe it to Griddy or record it once. For more on each path, read how a sentence becomes a runbook and how to turn a recording into clear instructions.
