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Approval Workflows: Recommendation Sign Off

Approval Workflows

Section titled “Approval Workflows”

Approvals put an admin sign off in front of acting on a cost recommendation. Today they are raised and decided in the Xplorr console. Doing the same from Slack, with buttons on a recommendation, is being built.

What works today

Section titled “What works today”

Approvals run in the console and are an Enterprise plan feature:

  1. On the Recommendations page, click Request approval on an open recommendation. It shows an Approval pending badge while the request is open, and a second request for the same recommendation is refused.
  2. An admin opens the Approvals page and clicks Approve or Reject, optionally with a reason.
  3. Approving moves the recommendation to in progress. Rejecting leaves it as it was.
  4. A request that nobody resolves expires 72 hours after it was raised.

Approving is a status change on the recommendation, not an action on your cloud account. Xplorr never modifies infrastructure.

See Approvals for the full page walkthrough.

From Slack today

Section titled “From Slack today”

The bot can change a recommendation’s status when you ask it to, for example “Mark recommendation as in progress”. It can set in progress, applied or dismissed. This goes straight to the new status and does not raise an approval request.

Approval requests are not posted to Slack, and they cannot be approved or rejected from Slack yet.

Being built: one click buttons in Slack

Section titled “Being built: one click buttons in Slack”

The Slack side of this workflow is written but not yet reachable, because no message Xplorr sends today carries the buttons. When it ships:

  • A recommendation card will carry Apply (moves it to in progress), Snooze 7d, Dismiss (archives it) and Details.
  • Apply on a recommendation whose estimated monthly savings are at or above the approval threshold will raise an approval request instead, posted in the same channel with Approve and Reject buttons for an admin.

The approval threshold is $500 of estimated monthly savings. It is not configurable in the console.

Microsoft Teams support for the same buttons is being built along with the Teams bot.

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