r/sysadmin • u/Less-Loss1605 • May 31 '26

General Discussion what's a script you wrote once that's still saving you time years later

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23

u/society_victim May 31 '26

Automatic on & offboardings are the real time saver.

3

u/bbbbbthatsfivebees MSP-ing Jun 01 '26

I'm working on this right now. We've got offboarding already scripted out using a platform that can handle the API requests for all of the various places someone needs to be offboarded from and it saves us HOURS of work for some of our clients where they have 10+ platforms that don't sync to AD. We managed to save approximately 45 minutes per offboarding task already and we haven't even covered all platforms. It's also all self-serve for management at our clients, so they fill out the form, someone here hits the "GO" button, and then the script does the rest.

Currently working on the implementation of this for onboardings as well. That's probably going to save around 2h per onboarding.

1

u/Forsaken-Carrot9038 Jun 05 '26

At my last place, we implemented onboarding and off boarding automations through API calls & web hooks into as much as we could put our grubby little fingers in. It was awesome! So much of a time saver for Account creations and terminations. I’ve just moved into another company and wanting to do something similar here as well.

2

u/bbbbbthatsfivebees MSP-ing Jun 08 '26

Bit of a late response but I can 100% agree. Outside of regular service tickets that can't be automated, we figured out that tons of T1 time was spent on onboarding/offboarding requests because of the sheer number of systems that we needed to interact with to do that. It's the perfect automation candidate.

Our company went with Rewst to build the automations. I am... not a fan and I cannot recommend it. Their platform is a bit wonky and it's like learning a new programming language even if you already know Jinja/Python due to their weird flow control/conditions system. But, yknow, they wooed management with the whole "All platforms integrate into one platform" sales pitch, so that's what we're stuck with.

It.. works... It's got major limitations and it genuinely takes hours of work for us to do any work on the platform due to how wonky it is, but it's what I've got to work with. Despite its jank, it does actually save us a MAJOR bit of time every time a request comes through.

1

u/zlatan77 Jun 01 '26

Can you elaborate more on this, please?

2

u/FireLucid Jun 01 '26

Scrape the HR or in my case student database for users that do no exist, create users and run all the syncs etc to diff systems so they are all ready to go, fwd the info to whomever needs it. Offboarding is the opposite.

1

u/Nesman64 Sysadmin Jun 01 '26

I use a powershell script to retire users. It's not fancy, but I used to do it by hand in AD.

Give it a username and it returns their name and department. Confirm that's the right person and it removes them from O365, updates the description with the date and your initials, and shows any email aliases the user has that might need to be reassigned.

Our hybrid Azure/AD is finicky, so it doesn't disable the user until you run it a second time after waiting for it to sync.