[Music] please subscribe to my channel and click on the bell icon to get the regular updates of my channel and do not forget to like comment and share hello everyone welcome to sas with servicenow servicenow has been marketing themselves as low code platform and in one of the recent release they came up with flow designer feature which has totally changed the way of development in servicenow for developers and process owners so today i'm presenting you new training that is servicenow flow designer training in this training you will learn what is flow designer and how you can utilize flow designer to fulfill the requirements of your customers and clients effectively so starting with overview of flow designer in this section you will learn about high level details of flow designer its components and architecture what is flow designer flow designer is a feature in service now which is used to automate processes in a single environment you can use natural language to automate different actions like approvals tasks email notifications and table operations such as update of rackets or create off rackets flow designer also comes with the capability of integrating servicenow with third-party applications with less coding which is performed via integration hub which is another feature of servicenow integrated with flow designer this is floor designer landing page which shows all different components you can create or manage flow designer on this particular page benefits of flow designer there are a lot of benefits of floor designer and we will see few of them first one is whatever automation you will perform it will be done in a single platform another benefit is even the users with non-technical knowledge can work on flow designer as it is based on natural language logic you can create different actions in flow designer which can be reused in different automations floor designer also reduces probability of syntax error which you normally get while doing coding in servicenow flow designer also reduces the cost of upgrade and maintenance as it leads to minimum customization one of the best feature of flow designer is integration hub which enables easy integration capability with third-party applications like microsoft slack and jira system extractor and many more integrations flow designer components let's see what different components we have in a flow designer starting with flows that's the first component of flow designer next is subflows actions core actions action steps and the last one is spokes you have multiple spokes in flow designer starting with flows flows are similar to workflows in servers now a flow is an automated process which has sequence of actions and a trigger it automates business logic for a particular application or process for example you want to assign a p1 incident to one specific group automatically you can achieve with the help of flow now if you want to work on flows in flow designer then you should have basic knowledge of servicenow platform tables and fields for an application or process so let's say you're working for incident application so you should be aware of all the fields what all fields are needed or what all fields we have on incident table so that you can create flow for that particular table now the list which you are seeing on the screen this is showing you all out of the box flows however you can create new flows or copy existing flows as well and add different configurations in that particular flow sub flows a subflow is an automated process which has sequence of actions however it takes data inputs that allow the process to be started from a flow a subflow or a script that means you create sub flows but you have to trigger it by taking some input maybe from flow may be from another soft flow or script so flows automate generic business logic which can be applied to multiple applications or processes as an example if you want to send emails to users related to the racket on which flow is being triggered then you can create a subflow and you can use that subflow into different flows as well depend on the kind of requirement you have so you can see the list of flows these are all out of the box of flows in servicenow platform actions action is a reusable operation that enables users to automate different features in servicenow platform without writing a code for example there is an out of the box create record action which allow users with right access to generate records in a particular table with particular values when condition is matched you can see list of out of the box actions of the instance that is in my personal developer instance but you can also create new actions as well as per your requirement so servicenow also gives you capability or option to create your own custom actions core actions core actions in flow designer are out of the box actions available in a flow and these flows cannot be viewed or edited from action designer for example ask for approval action which is a core action that allows users to use platform approvals you can also activate application specific core actions by enabling spokes of those applications action steps an action step is a single reusable operation within an action for example the create record action allows users to specify the table and field values which is used when record is created spokes servicenow flow designer has added lot of automation related to different applications a spoke is a scoped application containing flow designer content which is dedicated to a particular application or type of racket for example the itsm spoke contains actions for managing task record such as create task action now spokes are activated with their parent application however servicenow already provides some out-of-the-box spokes like you can see on the screen like servicenow core then we have for connect application we also have for global we have some itsm as well so we have itsm spoke then we have password reset and then we have few other applications as well like vtb that is visual task board so depend on the kind of license you have however you will still get few spokes with your existing application which will not require any kind of license architecture overview of flow designer so how flow is triggered in service now when flow is created then it should be triggered as well to perform some action so flow consists of triggers and different actions this trigger can be racket based or scheduled based racket-based trigger is triggered when selected racket in a flow is created updated or deleted schedule based trigger is triggered at a specific date and time as per the type of schedule configured let's understand how flow gets processed so sequence starts from triggering of flow when condition mentioned in flow gets occurred then an event record is added in the event queue to start the flow the scheduler of servicenow process the event and starts the flow then system then build a process plan as per the steps and actions mentioned in the flow system automatically checks that what kind of plan we have available as per the actions and steps you mentioned in the flow and then system runs the process plan using the record associated with that particular flow and once flow is triggered and flow started running then system stores the information about the flow execution which is also used for troubleshooting so once flow is triggered and once flow has started executing in that phase if you really want to troubleshoot let's say you're not you're not able to get the expected uh expected results as part of the flow then you can also troubleshoot with the help of all these tracking which we are doing as part of the execution we are tracking all the logs as part of the execution flow has different states which shows the progress status of the flow and the first state is waiting when flow waits for any event to occur so the state will be waiting next is in progress that means flow is running then we have error in which one of the action got failed and gave error then we have cancelled state when flow is cancelled and will not be triggered or run again and user with right access can cancel a flow as well and the last state is completed so when flow is totally performed that means it has performed all the actions which are mentioned in that particular flow and the whole flow got completed without any error then the state will become completed flow status flow also shows status which is state of publishing that means it will show you some state which shows that whether a particular flow is published or not so there are three status of a flow draft when new flow is created or existing flow is updated and saved without publishing so that will be called as draft status then we have published when flow is ready and can be made available to be used that will be the final stage the final status of a flow and that is published and the next is modified when flow is updated without saving that means you create a flow you publish it and then you perform some changes in that flow in that case it becomes modified flow activation flows can also be activated or deactivated so you will see a button activate or deactivate on the flow once created or updated so you can make a flow active you can make it inactive as well by using this activate and deactivate buttons in flow designer flow action limitation there is some limitation in flow designer regarding number of actions which can be created in a flow by default you can create 50 actions in a flow in flow designer which can be changed by updating number in a property that is sn underscore flow underscore designer dot max underscore actions however large number of actions can impact the performance of the system so max to max i would always recommend to use 50 to 60 actions in a flow designer in a particular flow and if you really want to create more actions i would recommend to break your flow or maybe you create sub flows flow testing flow has a feature in which you can test a flow for a specific racket you will see a test button on a flow which can be used when you want to perform testing for the flow you will be creating service servicenow has an application flow designer which is used to manage and configure flow and automation in servicenow let's see flow designer application and modules in my personal developer instance this is my personal developer instance now till orlando version you will find flow designer as a separate application however from paris version servicenow has introduced process automation designer which is a simpler version of flow designer and they have added flow designer in process automation application so if i type process automation you can access the same application now under under this application you will find flow designer and the first module we have under this application is getting started which will take you to the service now documentation and then we have next module that is flow designer now this module if you will click on this module this will open up the landing page of flow designer functionality so you can see this is the landing page of flow designer in which you can see flows you can see subflows actions executions connections and help as well which shows different types of links to get more information like documentation some videos and community discussions now if i go to application again now under this application after flow designer you have another section of module that is flow administration which has different modules to administer flows like you can see we have some logs like some executions as well that's what you can find uh under this section of modules so the first module under this section we have is today's execution now when flow instance is triggered then it creates a record in the system and in today's execution you can see all executions of flows are running on the current date so whatever flows which were triggered today that you can see all those records in this particular list then we have active flows which shows the list of executions waiting for some action where state is waiting then you have content definitions so you have list of contents that means we have a lot of contents and flow designer so you can configure those contents and their configurations uh in this particular view that means in the list whatever whatever contents you have like you have actions you have different steps you have flows you have flows category those configurations you can manage in this particular list next is inbound email flows which shows the list of triggers which are associated with inbound email those triggers you can see in this particular list the next is content filtering rules which shows the rules defined to provide access to different contents of flow designer like actions steps or subflows then we have event queue now here it shows the status of the queue so and this is not related to just related to flow designer this is your platform uh events that is what it is showing so whatever events which are basically generated from flow you can see the status of those events that how exactly it is progressing or what is the status of those events which are generated by flow designer then we have operations dashboard which shows the execution status of different flows in the platform on the basis of some metrics like how many flows got created today and how much time they took to run all those information you can see in this particular dashboard like you can see it for today you can also see for previous 30 days that how many flows got created how many flows got triggered and you can see the status as well and some like runtime trends as well so all these different kind of metrics you can see in this operations dashboard then we have settings in which you can configure basically enable or disable reporting of execution of flows because as you can see we have operations dashboard which is basically showing you the report that yes these are the flows which are maybe getting executed uh this is what the status we have now if you want to control that enable and disable of the reporting for a particular flow or a sub flow or an action that you can control it by this settings option and you can create those rackets accordingly then we have complex objects templates in which you can create templates for creating complex objects in flows that's another feature we will talk about that feature later in this training and last one is properties in which you have some configurations of flow designer like i i said earlier about the maximum number of actions which are allowed on a flow here you can see the number which you can change however if you will increase the number maybe you will make it 90 or 100 it might impact the performance of the system of the platform so it's better to have limited number and i think 50 is the right value i think you can make it maybe max 60 not more than that otherwise this will definitely impact the performance let's create a flow so i will go to flow designer landing page so i will come to flows now in order to create a flow you have to click on this new button but before that as you can see we have these list of flows available as well these are all out of the box flows which are created for different type of functionalities but as i mentioned in order to create a flow you just need to click on this new button which will ask you which will give you three more options whether you want to create a flow you want to create a subflow or you want to create an action so in that case i just want to create a flow right now so i will click on flow now this will give me a pop-up this is a screen where i have to provide basic details of the flow i'm going to create so maybe i can put over here like a test flow and then here you can select the scope now it's totally up to you what kind of scope you want to keep so i'm keeping it as global right now then we have description here you can provide more details about the flow why you want to create it what what kind of features we have in this particular flow what kind of uh maybe what kind of functionality i can achieve with this flow that you can mention in this description now next field we have is run as this is definitely an important field because this definitely decides when flow will be triggered with what user it will be triggered so you want to run it as a user who will initiate that session or you can also change that value to the system user so that means once flow will be triggered it will basically uh treat it as a system user that means it will run as a system user now if i will select user who initiates session so service now gives you another feature that is run with roles so let's say you want to run a specific flow by by using by using any kind of maybe a specific role that means because whatever action you are you are using in that particular flow or whatever action you want to take in order to take that action that particular role is needed so in that case you can specify that role as well you just need to click here and click on pick a role now this will give you the list you can search here let's say we can mention itel so and i can mention so even if the session will be initiated initiated by a non a non-ideal idle person system will still run uh run the flow with this particular role that means this role whatever access whatever actions will be taken as part of the flow will be considered as part of the idle access not the user who is actually initiating that particular session so i will just remove it for now so once you are done with this by providing all the information important information like name application and then run as then i can click on submit once you will click on submit it will create the flow successfully it will show you the message as well you can see a different screen now that means this shows you different other components and here we have trigger here we have actions which you can create you can see the status as well you can see the name which you have provided while creating the flow then you have scope as well and here we have properties now this is the same pop-ups if i will click on properties you can see the same page that is the flow properties where we have basic details of flow i i would say not just basic because here is the important information that is run as as well so i will just cancel this uh then we have some other buttons which you can see here like test executions they are graded out right now because they will be enabled once i will create the flow and save it so let's say let's say if we are we are creating an incident and if category is network then that incident should be assigned to a network team so in that case what i will do i will click on this or maybe i will make this screen a little bit small so that i can see all the components of this flow here i will click on trigger and i will select the trigger now this time the trigger will be created so whenever new incident will be created now here it is asking me for an input and that input is stable so i can mention incident so i will select incident so whenever incident will be created i can still mention any kind of condition and that condition is that category should be network so in that case i can mention category is network if i will select category is network i can click on done and i will click on actions here i have action i have flow logic i have sub flow now you can see because i added something i have i have added trigger it has populated this save that means now i can see this save button i can save this flow now initially it was not this was totally gridded out this was not enabled but now this button is enabled and i can click on this button to save this flow further so i can click on action and what i need to do i just need to update the racket so i can go to one of the action which is update racket once you will do that you can this is the data pill now if i will select here i can select uh the racket which was created so i can select the incident bracket it will automatically populate the table and then i need to mention assignment group that's what i need to update so i can select assignment group and here i can put maybe let's select network cap managers and that's it and if i save this now you can see that other buttons are also enabled now save is gone the reason behind it because we have saved it so why this button will be enabled until unless i will do some changes if i will add something i will change something then save button will again be enabled so now you can see we also have test so test is definitely another feature that if i have any racket and i want to test this flow i can do that i also have executions once this will be triggered this flow will be triggered will start executing i can see the executions as well that where exactly or how exactly it is executed then we have activate now this is very important button because until and unless you will not click on this button this flow will not be triggered automatically so in order to trigger it automatically you have to click on this activate button so we will click on activate i will click on ok now once you will activate this button you will also see that this activate button will be disabled and new button that deactivate button will be enabled because i can deactivate the flow as well so this time it is activated now what i will do in order to test this flow whether it is it is executed or not i will go to my instance i will type incident i will create a new incident so i clicked on create new i will select the caller so maybe i will select this one and i can select the category as network and i can put here test for fd that is flow designer and i will just save it that's it i will save this once it is saved flow designer that means this flow should be triggered so in order to check that i can click on executions and you can see the flow has triggered because condition was matching because incident got created so in that case if i will click this button and this racket i can see this flow getting executed so it says waiting for flow execution data that's fine i think it is still gathering it says complete that means it was executed successfully and you can see the execution details now you can create a flow as well you can create context record now this is the same context record which gets created in the back end in order to show you all the status now here we have triggered which got completed the yes it was matched now if i will click on this eye icon you will see that for what record this particular triggered trigger was generated so you can see this is for one zero zero one and if you can see it is the same record if i will come over here and i will close this and i will come here you can see assignment group is updated network cab manager because this was updated by flow designer i didn't have to write any code i didn't have to write any business rule with just flow designer i was able to achieve this functionality however this is just a basic functionality you will definitely learn more things about flow designer that you can achieve a lot of complex things as well which you normally write in a script with flow designer so i will go here now here you can see it says update racket and it also says completed that means it found the racket and it was able to update the same record if i will expand it so i can expand it like if you will click on this particular link that particular that particular action step will be expanded automatically so here you can see it says this particular value and then it shows all the condition trigger output what exactly the output i'm getting that's a record id this is the id and if i'm going a little bit bottom you can see it is updating the racket because i already mentioned that this should update network cab managers as as assignment group and it has done that that's the reasons this action was taken without any issue and that's the reason it says completed that means this flow was executed successfully for that particular racket so this is how you create a flow in flow designer in service now and as i mentioned this is not the limitation servicenow floor designer is definitely really i think it has really great powers which can fulfill a lot of requirements uh which you get from your customers and clients and that is also complex requirement and for which you you normally do development you normally do coding in service now and that's something you can achieve with just flow designer now before i before i end this particular session i just want to highlight one important point of flow designer that it has been observed that flow designer is uh pretty much slow if i talk about execution point of view uh and if i if i compare maybe workflow if i compare with the with business rules then flow designer is definitely slow so if you will write a business rule and if you will write a flow designer with with similar similar type of action that means updating assignment group after creation which you can also achieve with a business rule in that case flow designer will update that record little bit later than what you can achieve with business rule so business will will definitely be i would say more much faster than flow designer that's i can say that's kind of a loophole uh but but i cannot say that it is stopping your work because wherever you need any kind of um async update you where you don't need uh to have those actions right away i think flow designer to perform those automation flow designer will be definitely powerful because it is definitely a great thing that you are able to achieve something without writing a code um that's that's a really great feature in in service now and and as i mentioned servicenow is definitely focusing on low code development and service now moreover they have introduced a new feature in paris that is process automation designer and i will definitely publish a session a separate training for process automation designer as well maybe i will continue process automation designer as part of this flow designer sessions but please do watch my further videos which you will get soon i will be posting those videos as well but my target was to upload first video on flow designer so that i can begin this training and show you the powerful feature of flow designer in service now so thanks for watching this video and have a great day and keep learning service now