Flow Designer is a visual workflow builder for when the built-in lifecycle on incidents, changes, problems, service requests, or releases doesn't quite match how your organization actually wants something to move through its stages. A workflow can also run standalone, with no ticket attached, for a process that doesn't belong to any one record type.
Building a workflow
On a canvas, click Add State for each stage your process needs, then drag from one state to another to draw the transition between them. Mark exactly one state as the starting point, and mark whichever states are true endpoints.
Gating a transition
Click any transition arrow to configure what it takes to move through it:
- Approval — require sign-off before the transition fires: from a role (manager and/or admin), a specific group, or a manager chain (the assignee's or requester's manager, or further up the chain). Add several approval steps in order, each needing either any one approver or all of them.
- Timer — set the transition to fire on its own after a set number of hours in the current state, with no one needing to click anything.
- Actions — attach side effects that fire along with the transition: post a webhook, send a notification (email, Slack, Teams, or both), post a comment, or update a specific ticket field.
- Automatic on start — a transition leaving your starting state can fire immediately when the workflow begins, skipping a manual first click.
Branching and rejoining
A state can fork into several parallel branches, each with its own outgoing transitions, and a later state can be set to join specific branches back together — waiting for all of them to arrive before continuing. Useful when part of a process can happen at the same time, like notifying two different teams in parallel instead of one after another.
Starting a workflow automatically
Beyond starting one by hand, a workflow can have trigger conditions — field-based rules (for example, priority equals critical) that, when matched by an incoming or updated ticket, start an instance automatically. Leave the conditions empty for a workflow that only ever starts manually.
Running and tracking instances
Active Instances lists every workflow currently in progress, showing its current stage (or that it's completed). Expand one to see the available next steps, any approval still pending, and a full history of every transition so far — who moved it, when, and any notes attached. Approvals waiting on you specifically show up in the Approvals tab, alongside a history of decisions already made.
Managing definitions
Activate or Deactivate a workflow to control whether it can auto-start from its trigger conditions, without deleting it. Edit reopens the canvas — saving updates the definition in place rather than creating a new version, so changing a live workflow takes effect immediately for anything that starts after. A definition that already has run history can't be deleted; deactivate it instead. An active standalone workflow also gets a Run Now button right on this list, so you can start an instance on demand instead of waiting for a trigger condition to fire.
Example
A team wants every emergency change to notify both the security team and the infrastructure team at the same time, then only proceed once both have acknowledged. They build a workflow targeting changes: a starting state forks into two parallel branches, one per team, each ending in a manual acknowledgment transition, converging into a join state that waits for both before advancing. Trigger conditions are set to change type equals emergency, so any emergency change kicks the flow off automatically the moment it's created.