How to use Make Grid

grid helps you understand and manage your automation ecosystem here are the most common ways to work with grid based on what you're trying to accomplish open your dependencies from grid your automation landscape is not just something you can view, it is a fully interactive environment where you can manage your dependencies what you can do you can open, review, and edit connected objects directly from grid canvas without needing to jump between tabs view and edit view and edit google sheets, docs, slides, calendar, and jotform directly within grid to make live changes view only preview google forms, tally, and typeform to verify configurations example you are reviewing a complex automation and spot a google sheet that needs a quick data correction before your automation goes live instead of searching through your drive or browser history, you simply open the google sheet from grid, update the cell, and save it you cav perform a cross platform update without ever leaving your automation map view and understand your dependencies when you're managing multiple , it's easy to lose track of how everything is connected grid shows exactly which rely on each dependency what you can do click any dependency, such as an airtable table, to see which rely on it hover on the specific links to open the directly you can also search for any entity such as a table, an url, or app to instantly see what depends on it example your team uses a shared "offboading users" table in airtable across multiple you search for it in grid and immediately see it's used by four now when someone asks "can we change this table structure?" you have a complete picture of the impact trace your data flows grid helps showcase data flow of the automation you've built using when you click on a dependency, you can view which read or write to that dependency what you can do click on any dependency to see which interact with it view which read from or write to that dependency and understand the chain of actions example in the example below, you can see that the request logger is triggered by a webhook and it writes to a dependency, which is google sheets so when a colleague asks where does the request logger gets its data from, you open grid to explain the flow click on the request logger to trace the flow webhook triggers request logger → request logger writes to google sheets → data is now available for you due to this data flow, you can see the chain of actions within your solution find errors in your scenarios the red flags shown in the image are an indication that your have errors and need your attention what you can do you can either click on individual red flags or click the need your attention widget and view all with errors at once this allows you to quickly identify which scenarios are impacted and prioritize your investigation example in the example below, click the slack ai gardener error for analysis click check to view the ’s history log and investigate further these errors are not only displayed in but can also alert you to issues with dependencies, such as capacity problems in data stores or queue backlogs in webhooks view your credit consumption grid helps you understand how credits are consumed across your automations by using the select layer feature, you can visualize credit usage, data transfer, and operations consumed over the last 30 days this helps identify that may need optimization what you can do click on the credits layer and zoom in on a to view its credit usage each is represented by a circle, where the size of the circle indicates the amount of credits consumed the larger the circle, the higher the credit usage example in some cases, you may see higher consumption than what is displayed in your mapped in the below example, the shows a total consumption of 17,280 credits however, reviewing the credits consumed by its dependencies, the total is 8,640+0+0=8640 this discrepancy occurs because grid does not display the credit consumption by data transformers such as iterators, aggregators, and similar components when you open the , you can see it includes an array aggregator and an iterator, which together account for the rest of the credits deprecate a column in your database grid helps you safely deprecate part of a data element, such as a column in a database, by showing where it is used across your automations this visibility helps prevent breaking when making changes what you can do select the dependency and click attributes in the side panel to view all mapped to a specific column you can see which reference that attribute and assess the impact before making changes example in the example below, you want to deprecate a column in an airtable called status grid gives you an option to view the dependencies that map to this attribute you can click attributes in the side panel and see that this column is used in two you can then open the scenario by clicking the open scenario pop out button and edit the dependency in the editor identify the endpoints of your http modules grid helps you quickly identify the service endpoints used by your http apps what you can do select an http app in the grid and open the endpoint tab in the right side panel this shows the service associated with the endpoint example in the example below, selecting an httpapp and opening the endpoint tab displays the service endpoint it connects to this makes it easy to understand which external service the app communicates with and helps when reviewing, troubleshooting, or documenting your integrations view your active scenarios grid helps you manage large workspaces by providing a clear view of your automations but as the number of grows, the grid can become crowded, making it harder to navigate and analyze dependencies what you can do in grid, you can use the filters panel to narrow down the displayed for example, select active to hide inactive ones and focus only on the that are currently running example in the example below, applying the active filter removes all inactive from the grid once filtered, you can use the align tool to automatically arrange all elements, creating a cleaner and more organized layout