Playbooks

Build and manage playbooks in Cortex AgentiX to automate security response workflows.

Playbooks are a series of tasks that run in a predefined flow. They save time and improve investigation and response outcomes. They automate security processes, including investigations and ticket management. For example, a task can parse an issue or a PDF attachment. Playbooks also standardize incident response workflows.

Prerequisite

To work with playbooks, an administrator must configure their user role with specific RBAC permissions.

• Permissions must be enabled in the following order:

1. Scripts: Under Investigation & Response → Automations, set this component to Enabled first. It is required for all automation. Without it, you cannot configure Playbooks or Cases and Issues. Role permissions control script creation and edits to Public scripts.
2. Playbooks: Under Investigation & Response → Automations, set this component to Enabled. Role permissions control playbook creation and edits to Public playbooks. Object-level permissions control access to individual custom playbooks and scripts. See Access to playbooks.
3. Cases and Issues: After enabling Scripts and Playbooks, set this permission under Cases & Issues to View or View/Edit. This permission is required to view playbook results within a case.

• Credentials: While not required to open the Playbook Editor, a minimum of View permissions for Credentials is required to select or reference stored secrets within playbook tasks. If your role has the Credentials permission set to None, you will be unable to select credentials from dropdown menus. Furthermore, any task that attempts to retrieve a credential to authenticate an integration command will fail during execution because the system cannot fetch the secret under your role's restricted context.
• Restricting playbook access: To completely restrict playbook access, first set the Cases and Issues RBAC permission to None and then set the Playbooks permission to Disabled.

Automation Engineer agent for playbook development (preview)

Use the AI-powered Automation Engineer agent to simplify playbook creation and management through an intuitive, interactive experience. It enables you to generate, modify, and query playbooks with the Cortex Agentic Assistant natural language chat prompt. For example, within the chat, you can ask the agent to "Add a step to block the domain in Okta" or ask it to explain how a specific conditional branch operates.

For more details about using the Automation Engineer agent, see Accelerate playbook development using the Automation Engineer agent (preview).