A radically new way of building
Tines helps the world's most security-conscious companies automate their repetitive workflows. But how does it actually work? Here are a dozen key features of Tines.
Simple building blocksSeven Actions
Seven Actions
and a storyboard
Every workflow is made up of a sequence of steps: "receive alert" → "check if duplicate" → "send notification". In Tines, we call these steps Actions.
Tines lets you automate any manual workflow by dragging, dropping and connecting a series of Actions together in what we call a Story.
Tines is powerful because there are only seven Action types. That’s it. Every Story you build will be a unique combination of them, configured in different ways. And anyone can learn how to use Actions: no code, no scripting, no SDKs.
Once you’ve mastered the seven Action types, you have every tool you need to automate your workflows. The Action types infinitely stack and combine – like Legos – allowing you to automate messy, real-world processes of unlimited complexity.
Templates and integrations
Tines comes with over 2,000 (and counting) pre-configured Action Templates, allowing you to instantly integrate with the tools in your security stack, like Crowdstrike, Jira, Slack, or VirusTotal.
For cases where there’s no template – like your internal tools or lesser-known APIs – it’s not a problem. You can directly configure an Action to do what you need, and create your own private Action Templates for those things you need frequently.
Story Runs
See exactly what a specific Action did and when, both individually and within the context of the overall Story. This transparency is not only critical when it comes to building trust in the platform, it also makes debugging and troubleshooting quick and easy.
Send to Story
Sometimes, you’ll find sets of Actions that you want to reuse in different places. With Send to Story, you can call them from anywhere, even across different teams in your company. For example, HR could build a “Get Employee Information” Story, which all users and teams could make use of.
People-focused
Automation needs humans
Great automation only happens when people are involved: from collaborating on building and maintaining Stories, to providing input and oversight when they run. Here are four features – Prompts, Teams, Annotations, and Forms – built for human involvement.
Prompts
Human oversight can be critical. For example, you might want to confirm if a user intentionally spun up an insecure VM before tearing it down. Prompts allow you to pause the Story and automate response collection from a human through any system – like Slack, Teams, Email, SMS, or Jira.
Teams
Tines is better with teams. Invite your colleagues and collaborate on Stories in real time. Each team has their own workspace that allows you to restrict access to sensitive data and credentials.
Annotations
No more searching through wikis or docs to understand a workflow. Annotations provide a simple way to place documentation, notes, instructions and reminders directly on your story. Annotations support text, images, gifs, video, links, and pretty much everything else.
Forms
Most Stories run because they’ve received data from an external system (an alert was received from a SIEM, or a new ticket was created in Jira). But you’ll often want to run in response to data provided by a person, not a system. Forms allow you to build beautiful, powerful webpages in minutes, allowing anyone to kick off a Story with input.
Smart retries
In the real world, systems, networks, and applications fail – a lot. Tines contains a suite of robustness features, specifically designed to deal with external tools behaving in unexpected ways. Whether it’s an expired credential, a rate-limited API, or an external system that’s hard down, Tines will retry intelligently with fine-grained control.
Monitoring
Your Stories run 24×7×365. Action Monitoring allows for notifications when Actions succeed or fail, and even if it looks like their upstream has gone quiet. This offers peace of mind that your crucial processes are running as expected.
Scheduling
Say you have a story that onboards new employees on a daily basis. It fetches the list of new people from your HR system and creates new accounts in GSuite, Slack, ADP, Datadog and CrowdStrike. Using Scheduling it’s simple to define when and how often the story should run – without technical fuss like cron syntax.
Tines Tunnel
We love the cloud, but what if you need to automate interaction with an on-premise system behind a firewall? With Tines Tunnel you can access your systems running on private networks from our cloud, securely, without having to change firewall rules.