How Actions Work

The Action Node

The Action is a node chained after the Flow's trigger, and it is what turns the trigger's event into work, such as running an operation, cleaning up anomalies, sending a message, calling an external system, or managing tickets. The List of Actions panel groups the available actions into five categories, and each node on the canvas carries its own settings panel with that action's configuration.

Each action carries its own configuration, edited as an unpublished change that only takes effect when the Flow is published. See How a Flow Works for the full publish lifecycle.

Info

While an action holds unpublished changes, its node shows a CHANGED badge next to its name, and the You have unpublished changes banner appears on the canvas. Both clear when you publish.

On the canvas, action nodes show inline summaries with key details of their configuration: the datastore an operation targets, the channel a notification posts to, the addresses an email reaches, or the URL a webhook or HTTP action calls. That way you can tell the nodes apart without opening each panel.

The Five Categories

Operation

Runs a datastore operation when the Flow reaches it. The five types (Sync, Profile, Scan, Export, and Materialize) carry the same configuration options as running that operation directly on the datastore, so routine work such as refreshing schemas, profiling tables, scanning for anomalies, and exporting results happens without anyone opening the datastore. Only initialized datastores are offered. See Operation.

Anomaly

Manages anomalies that have gone inactive for a period you set. Archive moves them out of the active queue but keeps the record, and Delete removes them permanently. See Anomaly.

Notifications

Notifies people the moment the Flow runs, through In App, Email, Slack, Microsoft Teams, or PagerDuty, with message variables resolved from the event that triggered the Flow. See Notifications.

Workflow

Hands the event to an external system through a Webhook, an HTTP action, or an n8n workflow, carrying the event's context so automation can continue outside Qualytics. See Workflow.

Ticketing

Creates or updates tickets in the connected issue tracker from anomaly events, so investigation starts in the tool the team already uses for triage. See Ticketing.

How Actions Run

Every action hangs from a parent, either the trigger or another action, and starts only after that parent succeeds. Several actions can share the same parent; each branch then continues independently. When an action fails, the actions downstream of it are marked Skipped instead of running, so one broken step does not cascade into the rest of the chain.

In each run, every action records its own result (Pending, Running, Success, Failure, Skipped, or Aborted), visible on the execution's read-only graph along with the exact configuration the action had at that moment. See Flow Executions.

Chaining Rules and Limits

A single Flow accepts up to 10 Operation actions. Once the limit is reached, the Operation category is disabled in the panel (and Clone is unavailable on Operation actions) until one of the existing Operation actions is removed. The other categories are not capped.
The Ticketing category needs two things at once: the Flow's trigger has to be Anomaly Detected or Anomaly Status Changed, and the node you are adding has to hang from the trigger itself. Chaining from another action disables the category, even in an anomaly Flow. Otherwise it still appears in the panel, greyed out.
Notifications and Workflow actions end their branch. When the previous node belongs to one of these categories, every category in the panel is disabled and no further actions can be chained.