Edit

Migrate your Microsoft Sentinel alert-trigger playbooks to automation rules

  • Article
  • 3 minutes to read

This article explains how (and why) to take your existing playbooks built on the alert trigger and migrate them from being invoked by analytics rules to being invoked by automation rules.

Why to migrate

If you have already created and built playbooks to respond to alerts (rather than incidents), and attached them to analytics rules, we strongly encourage you to move these playbooks to automation rules. Doing so will give you the following advantages:

  • Manage all your automations from a single display, regardless of type
    (“single pane of glass”).

  • Define a single automation rule that can trigger playbooks for multiple analytics rules, instead of configuring each analytics rule independently.

  • Define the order in which alert playbooks will be executed.

  • Support scenarios that set an expiration date for running a playbook.

It's important to understand that the playbook itself won't change at all. Only the mechanism that invokes it to run will change.

How to migrate

Create an automation rule from an analytics rule

  1. From the main navigation menu, select Analytics.

  2. Under Active rules, find an analytics rule already configured to run a playbook.

  3. Select Edit.

    Screenshot of finding and selecting an analytics rule.

  4. Select the Automated response tab.

  5. Playbooks directly configured to run from this analytics rule can be found under Alert automation (classic).

    Screenshot of automation rules and playbooks screen.

  6. Select + Add new under Automation rules (in the upper half of the screen) to create a new automation rule.

  7. In the Create new automation rule panel, under Trigger, select When alert is created.

    Screenshot of creating automation rule in analytics rule screen.

  8. Under Actions, see that the Run playbook action, being the only type of action available, is automatically selected and grayed out. Select your playbook from those available in the drop-down list in the line below.

    Screenshot of selecting playbook as action in automation rule wizard.

  9. Click Apply. You will now see the new rule in the automation rules grid.

  10. Remove the playbook from the Alert automation (classic) section.

  11. Review and update the analytics rule to save your changes.

Create a new automation rule from the Automation portal

  1. From the main navigation menu, select Automation.

  2. From the top menu bar, select Create -> Automation rule.

  3. In the Create new automation rule panel, in the Trigger drop-down, select When alert is created.

  4. Under Conditions, select the analytics rules you want to run a particular playbook or a set of playbooks on.

  5. Under Actions, for each playbook you want this rule to invoke, select + Add action. The Run playbook action will be automatically selected and grayed out. Select from the list of available playbooks in the drop-down list in the line below. Order the actions according to the order in which you want the playbooks to run.

  6. Select Apply to save the automation rule.

  7. Edit the analytics rule or rules that invoked these playbooks (the rules you specified under Conditions), removing the playbook from the Alert automation (classic) section of the Automated response tab.

Next steps

In this document, you learned how to migrate playbooks based on the alert trigger from analytics rules to automation rules.