N8N

timjeens

Hi,
Come across N8N, can anyone suggest uses for it for IT administration, infrastructure stuff (in azure), etc.

Thanks,

Tim

Ramin Ahmadi

Hi,

n8n is a great tool and there are a lot of use cases for it:

Azure Infrastructure Management

• Automate VM lifecycle management - spin up/down VMs based on schedules or triggers, reducing costs for non-production environments
• Monitor Azure resources and send alerts to Teams/Slack when thresholds are exceeded (cost, CPU, memory)
• Automatically tag resources based on naming conventions or metadata
• Create automated backup workflows for Azure SQL databases or blob storage
• Generate infrastructure reports by pulling data from Azure Resource Manager APIs

IT Operations & Helpdesk

• Connect ServiceNow/Jira tickets to Azure deployments - automatically provision resources when tickets reach certain stages
• Automate user onboarding/offboarding - create Azure AD accounts, assign licenses, provision resources, and notify relevant teams
• Build a chatbot interface (via Teams/Slack) that can execute common Azure CLI commands or check resource status
• Automate certificate renewal monitoring and notifications before expiration

Monitoring & Incident Response

• Create custom alerting workflows that correlate events from multiple sources (Azure Monitor, Application Insights, Log Analytics)
• Auto-remediation workflows - restart services, scale resources, or run diagnostic scripts when issues are detected
• Generate and distribute weekly/monthly infrastructure health reports

Cost Management

• Track Azure spending across subscriptions and send detailed breakdowns to finance teams
• Identify and shut down orphaned resources (unattached disks, unused IPs)
• Alert when resources exceed budget thresholds with automatic approval workflows for overages

The main advantage of N8N over Azure Logic Apps or Power Automate is that it's self-hosted and open source, giving you more control and potentially lower costs for high-volume workflows.