How to send requests to external systems

The ability to send requests to external systems from your automation rules opens up a whole new realm of extremely powerful possibilities. This functionality can be used to send notifications, or issue data or any custom data to any application or system that accepts web requests over HTTP or HTTPS. For example, you could use this functionality to kick off a build process in a build tool such as Bamboo or Jenkins, or to initiate a password change in a centralized user directory system if it supports this.

In this section, we will look at the Send web request component and how to use it in automation rules to send requests to external systems. We'll begin by taking a look at the various configuration options available in the action.

In the following screenshot, we can see the configuration options for the Send web request action:

Figure 5.1 – Configuring the Send web request action

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