Automate a recurring analysis and the delivery of its results
A Workflow is an automation. It takes an analysis you have already validated, re-runs it on a schedule, and delivers the result to whoever needs it, without anyone opening Orion to make it happen.They scale with the job. The simplest is one analysis, one schedule, one email. A larger one queries several sources, produces a slide deck and a CSV, decides for itself whether the numbers are worth flagging, and mails different people depending on the answer. Between those two extremes sits most of what a data team currently does by hand every Monday morning.The recipe is fixed, and that is the point. A Workflow re-runs the notebook you already checked rather than working the analysis out from scratch each time, so the same queries and the same transformations produce this week’s numbers. You are not asking a question twice and hoping the answers are comparable.
Workflows are in beta, marked v2 Beta in the product. Existing Workflows
keep running, but expect the interface to keep moving.
Open a Workflow and it lays itself out as a graph of steps, running top to bottom.
Trigger: when the Workflow runs. A schedule, or you pressing Run Now.
Analysis: the notebook that does the work. This is the recipe, frozen at the version you validated.
Outputs: what gets produced. A report, a slide deck, a dashboard, an audio briefing.
Exports: data rather than narrative, such as a CSV of the underlying rows.
Notification: who hears about it, and what gets attached.
Click any step to configure it. The set of steps is not fixed either, so a Workflow can grow new outputs and notifications as the need appears.
Opening a Workflow requires Analyst or Admin on the project. Viewers cannot
open one at all, not even read-only. Your level can come from a group, so
being a Viewer elsewhere in Orion does not necessarily mean you are one here.
See Project Permissions.
Each project has a dedicated Workflows page listing everything in one place. You get to it from the project page: scroll to the Workflows strip below Shared Metrics and Published Content, and click View all. The strip itself shows only the six most recently run, and it is the way in, so it is worth knowing where it sits.
The Workflows page is where you actually work with them. Shared and Yours tabs separate the project’s Workflows from your own, and you get search, card and list views, and sorting by name, creation date, or most recently run.
Each card previews the Workflow’s graph, so you can tell a one-step report from a branching automation before opening anything, alongside its name, who created it, its schedule, the outcome of the last run, and when that run happened. A Workflow that has never run says so.Workflows are also indexed in Search under the Workflows filter.A Workflow starts out private to its creator, which is why a new one appears under Yours rather than Shared. See Sharing and Permissions for how to change that.
