Actionist·Rundeck

Rundeck

· #275 most-used

Run runbooks, execute jobs, and orchestrate ops automation from any workflow

ProductivityDeveloperSecurityAutomationCloud & InfrastructureMonitoring & Alerts

Rundeck is the open-source runbook automation and job scheduling platform, now part of PagerDuty Process Automation, that lets operations teams define, execute, and monitor jobs across any number of nodes through a web console and a full REST API. Connect it to Actionist and your agents can execute runbooks in response to incidents, poll execution status to gate downstream workflow steps, retrieve job output for logging or compliance, abort runaway executions, and maintain the job catalogue via export and import — turning Rundeck from a tool that requires server access into an automation layer any team can interact with through a workflow.

Try Rundeck with ActionistVisit Rundeck
Average time saved
13 hours
per person · per month
≈ 2 workdays back

Eliminates manual work. Agents eliminate the manual cycle of logging into Rundeck to execute runbooks, polling execution status by hand, scraping job output from server logs, and assembling cross-project health reports for operations and compliance teams.

Schedule

What your Rundeck agent runs on autopilot

A week of scheduled jobs your Actionist agent will execute on your behalf.

28Scheduled jobs
7Agents at work
24/7Always on
Agents
Tue–Thu
Tue
Wed
Thu
7a
8a
9a
10a
11a
12p
1p
2p
3p
4p
5p
6p
Multi-app workflows

Rundeck × every other app you use

End-to-end automations that span multiple apps — each one a real business outcome.

6Workflows
7Apps spanned
~21 hrsSaved / week
6Personas served
For operations
Featured3 apps

Auto-remediate infrastructure incidents via Rundeck runbooks

When a PagerDuty incident fires, the Operations Agent identifies the right Rundeck runbook, executes it automatically with context from the alert, polls until completion, and posts the resolution status and job output to Slack — closing the incident without human intervention for known failure patterns.

~5 hrs

Time saved for your team — every week, on autopilot

The flow
Trigger·When a PagerDuty incident is triggered for a known infrastructure failure pattern
Trigger
Step 1
PagerDuty
Incident triggered for database connection failure
read
Step 2
Rundeck
List Jobs in Project to find the DB-restart runbook
write
Step 3
Rundeck
Execute the database-restart runbook job
read
Step 4
Rundeck
Poll Get Execution Status until terminal state
read
Step 5
Rundeck
Fetch execution output to confirm restart succeeded
write
Step 6
Slack
Post resolution confirmation to #incidents with execution output
Result
Execute the database-restart runbook jobPost resolution confirmation to #incidents with execution output
The win
Saved per run
35 min
Runs / week
~8×
On-call engineers wake up to resolved incidents, not pages
Driven byOperations Agent
ROI

Savings

What your team gets back — two angles: what you stop doing manually, and what that's worth.

Without Actionist

What you do manually today

With Actionist

What your agent runs for you

  • Sales
    45 min / week
    Manual demo environment provisioning

    Sales engineers file IT tickets to provision demo environments, wait for confirmation, and manually verify readiness — consuming hours per deal and causing last-minute scrambles before calls.

    Sales Agent
    0 min
    Agent provisions demo environments via Rundeck automatically

    When a deal reaches the demo stage, the Sales Agent executes the Rundeck environment-setup job and polls for completion, so sales engineers always have a ready environment before the prospect call.

  • Marketing
    20 min / week
    Manual CDN flush verification

    Marketers manually check whether publishing and CDN-purge jobs have run by logging into the server, querying execution history, and eyeballing the results — a process that takes 20 minutes per campaign launch.

    Marketing Agent
    0 min
    Agent confirms content-publish jobs completed before traffic arrives

    The Marketing Agent checks Rundeck execution status for CDN-purge and publish jobs every campaign morning, posting a confirmed-live status to the team before peak traffic hours.

  • Customer Support
    60 min / week
    Engineer-dependent diagnostic execution

    Support engineers must escalate to infrastructure engineers to run Rundeck diagnostic jobs, creating bottlenecks during incident peaks and adding 30+ minutes to mean time to resolution.

    Customer Support Agent
    0 min
    Agent executes diagnostics from Slack without Rundeck access

    Support engineers request diagnostic runbooks via Slack and receive formatted output within minutes, without needing a Rundeck account or server knowledge.

  • Human Resources
    30 min / week
    Manual offboarding IT coordination

    HR emails IT to trigger account revocation, chases for confirmation, manually verifies in Active Directory, and documents the result in the HRIS — a process that spans 2-3 business days per departing employee.

    Human Resources Agent
    0 min
    Agent executes and verifies access-revocation jobs at offboarding

    When an employee is marked for offboarding, the HR Agent executes the Rundeck revocation runbook, captures the output as compliance evidence, and closes the IT task — all without HR needing server access.

  • Finance
    25 min / week
    Manual ETL job monitoring

    Finance team members ask a data engineer to check whether nightly ETL jobs completed successfully, wait for a response, and manually update tracking sheets — an unavoidable daily dependency on the engineering team.

    Finance Agent
    0 min
    Agent surfaces ETL health in a spreadsheet every morning

    The Finance Agent pulls nightly reconciliation job output each morning, extracts record counts and error rates, and writes metrics to the ops sheet — finance sees pipeline health without touching the server.

  • Operations
    120 min / week
    Manual weekly ops execution report

    Operations engineers manually pull execution history from each Rundeck project, copy numbers into a spreadsheet, calculate success rates, and format a summary — taking 2+ hours every Friday afternoon.

    Operations Agent
    0 min
    Agent reports cross-project execution health every Friday automatically

    The Operations Agent compiles success rates, failure counts, and duration trends across all Rundeck projects every Friday and posts the report to Slack — no one builds it manually.

  • Legal
    35 min / week
    Manual audit evidence collection

    Legal or compliance staff request server logs from IT, wait for access, manually grep for confirmation entries, and copy results into audit documentation — a multi-day process per quarterly audit.

    Legal Agent
    0 min
    Agent assembles audit evidence from execution logs automatically

    For compliance audits, the Legal Agent pulls execution history, extracts deletion confirmations from job output, and packages the evidence into a Notion page — server access not required.

+ 100s of other Rundeck automations
Average time saved
34 hrs / person / month
Calculator

Calculate what your team saves

Team size
5 people
Hourly rate
$75 / hr
Hours saved / week
16
Hours saved / year
800
Annual ROI
$60,000

Based on Rundeck's typical team usage — the visible tasks plus a few other automations the agent runs: ~3.2 hrs / person / week of admin work automated.

Connect

How to plug Rundeck into Actionist

Pick the connection method that suits your environment.

Connect using a Rundeck Personal API Token alongside your self-hosted Rundeck server URL. The token inherits the ACL permissions of the generating user account.

1
Open your Rundeck Profile

Log in to your Rundeck instance, click your username in the top-right corner, and select Profile.

2
Generate an API Token

Scroll to the User API Tokens section and click Generate New Token. Give the token a descriptive name (e.g. 'Actionist'), set an appropriate expiry, and click Generate.

3
Copy the token

Copy the token immediately — Rundeck will not show it again after you navigate away.

4
Paste into Actionist

Paste the token and your Rundeck server URL into the fields below and click Test connection. Actionist calls GET /api/version to verify the handshake.

Credentials you'll need
API Token*
Rundeck → User Settings → Profile → User API Tokens → Generate New Token
Server URL*
The base URL of your Rundeck server, e.g. https://rundeck.example.com:4440
Actions

15 actions your agent can call

Read and write operations available to your Actionist agent.

Triggers

0 events your agent can react to

Events your agent watches for, and the actions it kicks off in response.

This app has no triggers yet.
MCP servers

MCP servers that work with Rundeck

Connect Actionist to MCP servers built for or around this app.

Rundeck

MCP server for Rundeck API integration

rundeck-mcp-server

50 tools to manage Rundeck jobs, executions, projects, nodes, and system via MCP

FAQs

Questions about Rundeck + Actionist

How does Actionist connect to Rundeck?
Go to the Apps tab, find Rundeck, and click Connect. Choose API token authentication: in your Rundeck account navigate to User Settings → Profile → User API Tokens, click Generate New Token, give it a descriptive name, set an expiry, and copy the token. Back in Actionist, paste the token and your Rundeck server URL (e.g. https://your-rundeck-host:4440). Actionist runs a read-only system info call to verify the handshake before any operations run.
What permissions does the agent need on my Rundeck account?
Your API token inherits the ACL permissions of the Rundeck user account that generated it. For read-only operations (listing jobs, fetching execution history, reading node status) the token needs read access on the relevant projects. For write operations (executing jobs, aborting executions, importing jobs) it additionally needs run and write access. Rundeck's ACL policy files define these grants per project. Ask your Rundeck admin to create a dedicated Actionist service account with the minimum permissions your agent actually needs, rather than using a personal token with full admin rights.
Can I connect Rundeck to other apps in the same workflow?
Yes. Rundeck is most powerful when combined with the monitoring and ticketing tools that surface the need for automation. Common combinations: trigger a Rundeck job execution when a PagerDuty alert fires; post execution results to a Slack channel; log job failures to a Jira issue; pull execution history into a Google Sheets ops log; abort a running job when an anomaly is detected in your APM tool. Any of Actionist's 200+ connected apps can send or receive data alongside Rundeck in the same workflow.
What are the most common things agents do with Rundeck?
The four patterns that come up most often: (1) incident-driven execution — when an alert fires in a monitoring tool, the agent executes the appropriate Rundeck runbook job automatically; (2) scheduled status reporting — pulling execution history on a cadence and posting pass/fail summaries to Slack or a spreadsheet; (3) self-service ops — agents expose job execution to non-technical teams via a chat interface without granting direct Rundeck access; (4) deployment orchestration — triggering Rundeck deploy jobs when a CI/CD pipeline stage completes, then fetching the execution output to confirm success before proceeding.
Can Actionist trigger Rundeck jobs on a schedule, or should I use Rundeck's built-in scheduler?
Rundeck jobs can be executed on demand via the API, but Rundeck also has its own built-in cron-based scheduling. When you use Actionist with Rundeck, you have two scheduling layers: Rundeck's native schedule (inside Rundeck itself) and Actionist's agent calendar (which can trigger Rundeck API calls on a schedule). The recommended approach is to keep compute-intensive or infrastructure-touching schedules inside Rundeck where they benefit from Rundeck's logging and RBAC, and use Actionist to orchestrate the surrounding workflow — fetching results, routing notifications, and updating records in other systems after the job completes.
How do I handle long-running Rundeck jobs — can the agent wait for completion?
The Execute a Job action returns an execution ID and initial status. For longer-running jobs you need to poll execution status using Get Execution Status until the job reaches a terminal state (succeeded, failed, aborted, or timedout). Actionist agents can implement this pattern natively: execute the job, then check status on a short interval until completion, and only proceed with downstream actions (logging results, sending notifications) once the execution is finished. Set a reasonable timeout so the agent doesn't poll indefinitely if a job hangs.
What is the difference between Rundeck Open Source and PagerDuty Process Automation?
Rundeck Open Source is free, self-hosted, and covers the core job scheduling and runbook automation features accessible via the API. PagerDuty Process Automation (formerly Rundeck Enterprise) adds features like clustering, enhanced ACLs, an operations health dashboard, and native PagerDuty integration. Both versions expose the same REST API that Actionist uses, so Actionist works with both. If you are using the self-hosted open-source version you are responsible for running and securing your own Rundeck instance; the Actionist agent connects to it via your server URL and API token.
Can I pass dynamic parameters into a Rundeck job when executing it from Actionist?
Yes. When you execute a Rundeck job via the API, you can pass option values as request parameters — these map directly to the job's defined options in Rundeck. For example, a deploy job that accepts an environment option (staging or production) can be called with that option set dynamically based on what triggered the workflow. The agent can pull the option values from any upstream step — a form submission, a Git tag, a row in a spreadsheet — and pass them into the Execute a Job call. Check your job's option definitions in the Rundeck UI to know which option names to use as parameters.