Asking for confirmation before a workflow runs

Some workflows are useful most of the time, but not always: paging another team, posting to a customer channel, or changing an incident’s severity. Instead of making them manual, you can have the workflow ask first. When it matches, a prompt is posted in the incident channel, and the workflow only runs once someone approves it.

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Turning on confirmation

In the workflow editor, find And runs automatically under the trigger and click Ask first. It changes to Then asks for confirmation in the incident channel. Confirmation works for workflows whose trigger is about a single incident. It isn’t available for manually-triggered workflows, since running one by hand is already a confirmation.

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What happens when the workflow matches

When the trigger fires and the conditions match, a message is posted in the incident channel asking whether to run the workflow, with Run and Dismiss buttons. Nothing runs until someone answers.

• Run checks the conditions again, then runs the workflow’s steps. The message updates to show it’s running.
• Dismiss cancels the run, and the message updates to say so.

Only people who can see the incident can answer the prompt, and the first answer wins. A prompt is cancelled without running if:

• nobody answers it within 24 hours,
• the incident is declined, canceled or merged, or
• the workflow’s conditions stop applying before anyone answers.

The message updates to explain why the workflow didn’t run. Every outcome appears in the workflow’s Activity.

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Collecting a form when someone approves

A workflow that asks for confirmation can also have a form, just like a manually-triggered workflow. Steps can use the answers in the same way as other variables. Conditions, How often should this workflow run? and loops are decided before the form is filled in. So they can’t use the form’s answers, or expressions built from them. The workflow editor only offers them where they can be used. To turn confirmation off, remove the form first.