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Workflows -- Turning Insight Into Action

Learning Goals

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

  • Understand what workflows are and why they exist
  • Recognize how workflows integrate with notification channels such as Teams, Slack, and email
  • Explain how workflows reinforce governance, accountability, and ownership

Overview

Dashboards show you what's wrong -- workflows make sure someone actually fixes it.

Osprey Workflows connect insight to action by assigning ownership, tracking progress, and automating communication. They transform data reliability from a passive monitoring exercise into an active, accountable process. This is how data issues stop being everyone's problem -- and start becoming someone's responsibility.

Why Workflows Matter

In most PI environments, data issues tend to disappear into a black hole. A tag goes stale, a calculation fails, or a PI Vision display breaks -- and no one knows who owns it or when it will be fixed.

Workflows close that gap by creating a consistent process for identifying, tracking, and resolving issues. The lifecycle typically follows these steps:

  1. Identify the issue from dashboards or directly within an asset
  2. Change its status to indicate the stage of investigation or resolution
  3. Assign an owner or automatically route the issue to the right user or team
  4. Track progress through to resolution

Each issue now has a clear owner, timestamp, and activity history. This turns data quality management from a reactive scramble into a governed process -- one that brings transparency and accountability to every step.

Workflow Basics

Every asset or issue in Osprey has a status and a history. The most common statuses include:

  • No Issue Detected - The data is healthy
  • Data Issue Detected - A problem has been identified
  • Descendent Issue Detected - A problem has been identified in a child asset
  • Issue Reported - An issue has been reported and escalated.
  • Under Investigation - An owner is actively investigating or addressing the issue
  • Resolved - The issue has been verified and closed

Each status change can automatically:

  • Trigger a notification through email, Teams, or Slack
  • Add an entry to the asset's activity log and revision history
  • Optionally create or update a ticket in an external system such as ServiceNow or Jira

These events ensure that every action is visible, traceable, and auditable -- whether your team is working directly inside Osprey or through existing enterprise tools.

How to Use Workflows

Workflows can be used manually or automatically. The manual process is simple and consistent:

  1. Open the affected asset or issue
  2. Change its status -- for example, from Data Issue Detected to Issue Reported
  3. Add a comment describing what you're doing or what you've discovered
  4. Click Submit

Reporting an issue

Osprey immediately logs the change, updates the issue's history, and sends notifications to configured channels. Whether your team receives updates in Osprey, Teams, or email, everyone stays aligned on what's happening and who's responsible.

Tracking Open Issues

To view all open or ongoing issues, select Active Issues from the left-hand navigation. This dashboard lets you filter by status, owner, or label so you can focus on what's most important.

The Active Issues view becomes your operational pulse. It tells you:

  • What's currently being worked on
  • Which issues are blocked or waiting
  • What's been resolved

By monitoring this list regularly, teams can balance workloads, identify recurring issues, and measure overall data reliability trends.

Viewing all open issues

Governance and Ownership

Workflows reinforce Osprey's core principles of governance, trust, and visibility.

Governance -- Every issue is tracked and owned.

Trust -- Notifications ensure nothing falls through the cracks.

Visibility -- Managers and engineers can see exactly what's happening across systems in real time.

This structure not only keeps operations running smoothly but also provides a complete audit trail of who acted, when, and how.

Your Turn

  1. From the side menu, open Workflows

  2. Click Create New Workflow

  3. Select Email Notification

  4. Add name and email

  5. From the Pump 104A asset page, navigate to workflow from the Technical information section. Add the new workflow.

Knowledge Check

Question 1

What is the primary purpose of workflows in Osprey?

A. To visualize lineage graphs
B. To track, assign, and resolve data quality issues
C. To configure PI interfaces
D. To manage AF templates

Question 2

When you change the status of an issue in Osprey, what happens automatically?

A. The issue is deleted
B. The change is logged and may trigger a notification
C. The tag is recalculated
D. The AF template is cloned

Question 3

Why are automated workflows valuable?

A. They reduce PI data storage size
B. They ensure recurring issues are surfaced and routed without manual review or having issues passed around in email or buried in Teams
C. They prevent all data errors
D. They automatically fix stale tags

Question 4

Where can you track all open issues and their status?

A. In the Active Issues page
B. In the PI Data Archive
C. In the Osprey Logs tab
D. In the AF Template browser