Scripts Suck: Introducing Altostrat SDX Workflows, Your New Automation Engine

How many hours does your team lose to repetitive, manual tasks? Onboarding a new site, checking for inactive users, monitoring device health—these small jobs add up, pulling your most valuable experts away from the critical projects that drive your business forward.

While scripting can help, it often creates its own set of problems: complex code that’s hard to maintain, a lack of integration with other tools, and no central place to manage your automations. You need something more powerful, more visual, and infinitely more flexible.

Today, we're thrilled to announce a feature that will fundamentally change how you manage your network. Introducing Altostrat SDX Workflows, a visual automation engine that lets you connect every part of your infrastructure to create powerful, multi-step processes that solve real-world business problems.

This is not just another scripting tool. This is your command center for total network automation.

What are Altostrat SDX Workflows?

Workflows provide a visual canvas where you can build sophisticated automations by connecting building blocks. It’s an intuitive, no-code/low-code environment where you define a Trigger (the "when") and link it to a series of Actions (the "what").

You can build automations that react to anything:

A Schedule: Run a health check every hour.

A Network Event: When a new site is added...

An External Signal: When a payment is received in Stripe...

A Manual Click: When an admin clicks a button...

These triggers can then kick off a sequence of actions that interact with any service, process data, and make intelligent decisions.

From Repetitive Tasks to "Fire-and-Forget" Automations

Workflows are designed to take your most common operational playbooks and turn them into fully automated processes. Here are just a few examples of what you can build today:

1. Fully Automate New Site Onboarding
Turn a multi-step checklist into a hands-off process that runs every time a new device comes online.

Trigger: When a new site is added.

Action: Automatically apply your baseline "Security Essentials" policy.

Action: Make a call to Zapier to create a new row in your asset register Google Sheet, complete with the device’s serial number and model.

2. Proactive Network Maintenance
Stop waiting for users to report problems. Build workflows that find and fix issues before they escalate.

Trigger: Every hour.

Action: Check all sites for unregistered VoIP phones.

Logic: For any phones that are stuck, clear their active firewall connections to force a re-registration.

3. Automated Security and User Lifecycle Management
Enforce security policies without lifting a finger.

Trigger: Every week.

Action: Get a list of VPN users who haven't logged in for two weeks.

Action: Automatically disable their accounts.

Action: Send an email notification to the user and their manager.

Connecting Everything: Your Entire Infrastructure on One Canvas

The true power of Workflows is its ability to connect services that could never talk to each other before. This isn’t just for managing MikroTik devices.

With our library of actions, you can:

Connect to Any Device: Use the SSH Action to securely run commands on your other network gear—switches, servers, or any device that speaks SSH. All credentials are kept safe in the integrated Altostrat Vault.

Integrate with Any Cloud Service: The Webhook Action lets you send data to or receive data from thousands of modern SaaS platforms like Slack, Zapier, PagerDuty, or your own internal applications.

The Art of the Possible: A Real Customer Story

The possibilities are endless. One of our Australian customers is using Workflows to solve a problem that has nothing to do with traditional networking.

They have a remote, off-grid location with a Starlink backup service that costs $8/month. Connected to the on-site MikroTik RBM33G is a simple sensor on a serial port that measures the level of the property's septic tank.

Using Workflows, they built this ingenious automation:

Trigger: Every day at 8 AM.

Action: The workflow instructs the MikroTik router to poll the device connected to its serial port.

Action: It reads the septic tank level from the sensor's output.

Action: It stores this level as a custom metric in Altostrat SDX.

Logic: It checks if the level is above a certain threshold.

Action: If it is, it sends an email alert to the property manager to schedule a service.

This is what Workflows are all about: giving you the tools to solve your unique business challenges, no matter how unconventional.

The Future is Intelligent Automation

This is just the beginning. We are committed to making Workflows the most powerful and accessible automation engine for network professionals. In the coming months, we plan to release:

A Library of Pre-Built Templates: Get started in seconds with a collection of best-practice workflows for common tasks like security hardening, compliance reporting, and proactive maintenance.

An AI-Powered Flow Builder: Imagine describing what you want to automate in plain English and having the AI design the workflow for you. That’s where we’re headed.

Stop Scripting, Start Building

Workflows empower you to move beyond simple, single-device scripts and into the world of true, multi-system automation. It’s time to eliminate manual errors, free up your team’s valuable time, and build a network that truly runs itself.