My conversation with Cian Geoghegan, Reddit’s Staff CorpTech Systems Engineer, was packed with valuable insights and actionable takeaways for IT teams. Webinar attendees got to hear how Cian's team uses Tines to automate critical IT processes, improve efficiency and reduce manual workloads.
Read on to hear, in Cian’s own words, why Reddit chose Tines for their IT orchestration and automation, what improvements they’ve seen so far, and what the future holds. Or, for a deeper dive, you can watch the full webinar here.
Primary drivers for orchestration and automation at Reddit
Hanna: Can you tell us the primary drivers were for adopting workflow automation at Reddit?
Cian: I'm sure anyone that's familiar with the IT side of things or any systems will agree if you can automate it, it's generally the best way to go. User error can have a lot of downstream impacts, so the more we automate, the less risk we have of any errors coming in from that. Obviously, as we're growing, it's a huge deal for us to free up time for the rest of our team and our cross-functional partners by having as many things as we can automated.
Hanna: I'd like to get into some of the first use cases that you decided to build out in Tines. I know we've talked before about some of the tools that were a big focus, so getting into these and telling us how you decided which automations you should tackle first.
Cian: Yeah for sure. We have 25+ extra integrations that we’re actively working with, and we're constantly testing and looking at what else we can bring in and automate. Matthew Warren at Reddit, who I work with quite closely, is very much involved in that side of the house and has built some incredible automations for us for endpoint management — making sure everything stays up to date, making sure when a laptop is given out, instead of Help Desk having to go in and type in the user it's assigned to, we have it all in the background doing it automatically.
“We strive to automate as many workflows as possible, especially considering our large user base. If it involves a manual process, we see it as a candidate for automation.”
Before Tines: ‘A lot of manual lift’
Hanna: Was all of this handled manually? Were you having to complete all of these tasks by hand or assign it to somebody?
Cian: There was a lot of manual lift, thankfully not on my end, but on our end user support side and endpoint engineering side. We did have some basic automations from other tools but we very quickly realized it wasn't going to scale to what we needed, and we needed to streamline everything to make sure we can keep everything running in the background without people having to actively click buttons.
Hanna: And it sounds like you focused on those specific tools that you work in day in and day out to build out those automations. Is there any advice that you have for choosing which tools to work with first in Tines?
Cian: Yeah, our big ones are kind of around endpoint security, security in general, our identity systems, and our mail systems — the big things that everyone in the company interacts with. They may not know they're interacting with them, but behind the scenes, there's a lot of work that goes into keeping them running and everything ticking.
After Tines: ‘It’s saved 30+ minutes per offboarding for our end-user services’
Hanna: After implementing these automations, have you seen any efficiency improvements, any metrics or things that have improved over time?
Security and offboarding
Cian: A lot of the stuff we've built is not necessarily efficiency improvements. It’s very much perfect improvements for security so that we can have alerting fire the way we want without false positives. So basically any manual process we had seen the Help Desk using, for instance, we'd talk to them and ask, ‘How can we make your life easier?’ So offboarding - I'm sure everyone on the call who has to deal with offboarding is very much aware that if it's a manual process, it's a lot of steps to ensure you're bringing up licenses, you're removing access, you're making sure everything's shut down. It's probably saved 30 minutes plus per offboarding for our end-user services, which is a huge saving in the grand scheme.
The Big Red Button
Cian: The Big Red Button is a workflow we built for the security side of things. So if there's an active incident and we need to lock an account so we can investigate, rather than having someone manually go in and suspend the user, clear sessions, that kind of thing, we built a page in Tines. It's gated access so certain people can run it, but you put in the email address, it will look up the user, it will lock the account, and it will trigger some Slack messages so we're aware what's going on and we can start investigating.
Google Groups
Cian: Google Groups are great, and they're used throughout our company. The problem comes when you need to start having groups for managers and their chains. There's not really easy ways of automating that, so we've essentially built a custom model within Reddit using Tines and the Google APIs to automatically take new managers, create groups for them, populate it with either their direct reports if it's a reporting group or their org chain if it's an org chain group, which has helped a lot with the kind of business side of the house.
Culture of automation
Cian: And then the last big part was empowering people to build and deploy. Again, I'm sure a lot of people on this call are familiar with deploying Python, or whatever code you're using, in a big company is generally not as easy as just writing a script. There's a lot of aspects involved, getting it pushed into production and making changes and things. But that also has the other side where you need to be familiar with coding. You need to have some kind of coding background to actually be able to do these things.
Tines has allowed us to bring in people who wouldn't have the same coding background as myself or some other people on the team to actually build and create things. We've been able to create automations for things that we didn't necessarily think about but people had in the back of their mind, they just didn't know how to put that into code.
"(Tines has) been great at empowering the team to build and experiment and create automations that we never even thought of needing."
Why Reddit chose Tines
Hanna: I know we've hinted at this through the past couple of questions, but I did want to ask, why Tines? Why did Reddit decide that Tines is the right automation platform for them?
Cian: A lot of it was the accessibility of the automations in Tines. Like I mentioned earlier, you don't need a coding background. Once you understand how an API works — even to that point basic knowledge of, ‘I can query this and it will give me information’ or ‘I can send a payload here and it will do something’ — that's kind of the level you need to know, versus actually knowing how to code it and deal with the credentials and secret management. Tines obfuscates all of that for people who are less from a coding background.
"Tines is very much an integrator rather than an integration."
What I mean by that is, if you're dealing with identity data, it's always in JSON. A lot of tools handle JSON but Tines is the best I've seen — and I think most people on my team would agree best we've seen — in terms of handling the JSON. The fact you can literally look at an event, double-click beside it, and you can copy the JSON path without needing to actually remember what the path is huge and such a time-saver for us to be able to quickly build and respond to things as needed.
The future of automation at Reddit
Hanna: You've already built out so many fantastic automations, you're getting value out of them. What are you looking to next?
AI & Help Desk
Cian: Most people on this call are probably very familiar with AI, everyone wants to add AI to everything. Certain systems don't want to integrate with Slack, and it can become quite messy when you have different chatbots talking to a user. So with Tines, at the minute, we're trying to combine that all into one place and have APIs come into Tines, Tines will then handle the response and send it through one single bot.
We're currently doing it with our Help Desk team where they have a bot that will respond and send you some knowledge base articles about something you bought. If you need to raise a ticket, it will help you raise a ticket. We're very much looking to expand that further to what other tools can we bring in.
Visual verification
Hanna: And then I know you're also doing some specific work with visual verification, so working with a tool that allows you to essentially verify who you are. Can you tell me more about that particular use case?
Cian: That kind of ties back to the Help Desk and self-service kind of things. We're looking into a few different tools for it. We're trialling one at the minute where essentially Help Desk can put in a user and a Jira ticket, and it will generate a visual verification link, put it onto the ticket, and email it to the user.
They can follow that flow, and then the API for that will return and say this person's verified, to the point we don't even really need the Help Desk to give a code anymore. We can send that code directly to the user, we can have it be one-time use, we can have it set for ten-minute use, we can do it by Slack.
Hanna: Yeah, and I can imagine the efficiency that you gain from being able to do this around the clock is going to be huge. As you mentioned, your team is in multiple different time zones, so you could have folks in like, a completely different location just continuing to work even if IT folks aren't available.
Cian: Yeah, like someone in Sydney, if it's past SF hours, they'd be able to self-service and work themselves. We can also then log multiple ways of doing it at the minute in the trial. We're using Tines Records to log when something happens. It unlocks a whole host of potential capabilities for us and a lot of time savings.
The tests we've been doing already, it's probably been minutes saved per ticket that people have had to work on. And that's just from the Help Desk side. It streamlines it and makes it a better experience for the users in the company but also takes a lot of the workload off our user operations team.
Lessons learned
Hanna: I would love to hear about any lessons that you learned as you were building out the Big Red Button workflow, and then also just general lessons that you've learned throughout your automation journey.
Cian: The key thing that goes for any story is the process chain. How does every system interact with each other? I think it's a key fact that a lot of people tend to overlook.
"You need to make informed decisions with your automations."
The process chain and how you're building it is key to understanding if it would work the way you expect it to work. So making sure you have all the manual steps documented out, any tools that you're touching, or any information that you need.
Hanna: Any other lessons learned or things that you'd like to call out from either the Big Button workflow or with or any of the other workflows that you built?
Cian: Rate limiting — I'm sure everyone on the call is aware of rate limiting. Because you can build so quickly in Tines, it is easy to forget that you need to have some way of verifying you're not hitting rate limits. What happens when you hit it? Do you need exponential back-off? Do you need to wait a certain amount of time? So always testing your story to make sure you are taking into account rate limits and how you handle them.
Hanna: Awesome. I know another area that you mentioned was really important was just simplifying things.
Cian: I think when you start with Tines, it can get very easy to have a workflow that has a million different actions, because you can have an action and then just drag another action and another action. It can get very long and complicated-looking very quickly with the functions and stuff available. You can, most of the time, compress a lot of steps into one step. What we strive for now is, how do we make the workflow look as simple as possible without having too many actions?
Explore orchestration and automation best practices in The Essential Guide to Workflow Automation for IT Teams