Introduction to workflows

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Workflows are a powerful tool that let you automatically act on monitoring data. Workflows enable you to

• Automatically react to Davis events or security problems.
• Schedule reports, in line with holidays and work hours.
• Orchestrate IT processes across your entire IT landscape.
• Connect to both cloud and locally gated services.
• Combine out-of-the-box integrations with custom code.
• Visualize automated processes in a graphical workflow interface.
• Get live monitoring and a full audit trail of any automation execution.
• Define flow logic with custom conditions, automatic retries, loops, and parallel processing.

Eager to get going? Check out the quickstart example.

Authorization

To access the Workflows and view workflows, you need at least the following permissions.

To write and execute workflows, the following additional permissions are required.

You might need additional permissions to run certain tasks in the Workflows app.

The Dynatrace Hub entry for Workflows lists all the permissions under the Technical Information tab, in the User Permissions section.

For more about Workflows security, see User permissions for workflows.

Concepts

The Workflows app is your entry point to manage and monitor workflows. The app interacts with the automation service via its REST API. The automation service is responsible for processing your workflows and keeping track of the executions.

Workflow

A workflow specifies a repeatable process by assembling a series of tasks.

• The sequence of tasks is defined by their transitions, which allow for execution in series, in parallel, and with conditional paths.
• Workflows can be edited and monitored in a visual graph.

Task

Each step in a workflow is called a task.

• A workflow keeps track of tasks and their order.
• A task defines a unit of work (for example, Create Incident, Notify Ops in Slack, or Get error log count), including the conditions, retry behavior, timeouts and, most importantly, the input configuration required to achieve the work and provide a result to be used by subsequent tasks.

Action

An action is a generic, reusable function configured and triggered by tasks. For example, an action could be Create Jira Issue, while a task would execute the action with a specific configuration to Create Bug in Sample project.

• Actions are the tools to be assembled in your workflows to fit your custom process.
• Actions are provided out-of-the-box by Dynatrace and partners and can be installed from the Dynatrace Hub.

Execution

Workflows, tasks, and actions all define how work should be done. An execution represents a specific instance of running through that process.

• An execution is triggered either by a schedule, by events, or manually via the Workflows app or the REST API.
• Each execution of the same workflow might be different, depending on its parameters, inputs, and context.
• Each run of a workflow can be found as an individual entry in the Executions table.

These are the basic concepts you'll encounter while working with workflows. Happy automating!