authoring-techniques.md

navigation_title	Workflow authoring techniques
applies_to	stack serverless preview 9.3, ga 9.4+ ga
description	Techniques for authoring, running, monitoring, and organizing Elastic Workflows.
products	id kibana id cloud-serverless id cloud-hosted id cloud-enterprise id cloud-kubernetes id elastic-stack

Workflow authoring techniques [workflows-authoring-techniques]

Techniques that apply across workflow types, regardless of which outcome you're automating. Use this section when you're building or maintaining a workflow and need guidance on the mechanics.

• Use the YAML editor: Author and run workflows in the YAML editor in {{kib}}.
• Anatomy of a workflow: Every top-level field in a workflow definition and the execution lifecycle.
• Workflow settings: Workflow-wide settings reference, including timeout, timezone, concurrency, max step size, and global on-failure.
• Choose the right step: Decision aid for picking the right step type. Keyed by intent.
• Pass data and handle errors: Move data between steps, use dynamic templating, and make workflows resilient with on-failure.
• Compose workflows from reusable parts: Decompose long workflows into reusable child workflows, design the input and output contract, and fan out with asynchronous composition.
• Human-in-the-loop: Pause a workflow for reviewer input and resume on their decision.
• Monitor workflow execution: Track runs, review execution history, and troubleshoot failures.
• Manage and organize workflows: Find, edit, duplicate, enable, and disable workflows from the Workflows page.
• Troubleshoot workflows: Resolve common issues with triggers, flow control, cases, alerts, Liquid, AI steps, composition, human-in-the-loop, and concurrency.
• Migrate workflows from 9.3 to 9.4: Side-by-side replacements for the deprecated Case aliases, HTTP step timeout relocation, and scheduled-trigger minimum interval.

% Ben Ironside Goldstein, 2026-04-16: Follow-up PRs per Vision doc Section 7 will split pass-data-handle-errors.md % into separate how-tos (Pass data between steps, Handle errors and retries, Use constants and inputs) % and add Use conditional logic, Iterate over results with Foreach, Test and debug a workflow.