Why my workflow did not run

A workflow that does nothing gives you no error message, because from its point of view nothing has gone wrong. Diagnosing it is a matter of working down a short list in order.

Who this is for

Anyone whose automation is not doing what they expected.

Before you start

• The workflow in front of you.
• A specific record you expected it to act on — a concrete case is far easier to debug than a general feeling.

Check active first, every time
The most common cause by a wide margin is that the workflow was never activated. Drafts do not run. This is especially easy to hit with an installed template or a workflow created by an agent, both of which arrive as drafts by design. Check this before investigating anything else.

Work down the list

1. Is it active?
   Drafts do not run. Templates install as drafts and agent-created workflows are forced to draft, so this catches most cases immediately.
2. Did the trigger actually fire?
   Check whether the event genuinely happened. A trigger on a field that nobody changed will never fire, however correct the rest of the flow is.
3. Did the condition exclude it?
   This is the second most common cause. Run a dry run and look at the count — a condition matching zero records looks identical to a broken workflow.
4. Read the run history
   If the flow ran, the history shows what happened, including an action that failed. A run that appears here did fire, which changes the diagnosis entirely.
5. Retry a failed run
   Where an action failed for a transient reason, retrying is the fix. Where it failed for a real reason, the history tells you which action and why.
6. Check permissions and prerequisites
   An action that needs something absent — a sending mailbox, an integration — cannot complete. The run history usually says so.

What you get

• An ordered diagnosis instead of guessing.
• The distinction between never ran and ran-and-failed.
• A retry path for transient failures.
• Confidence about whether the trigger or the condition is at fault.

Frequently asked questions

What is the single most common cause?

The workflow was never activated. Drafts do not run, and both templates and agent-created workflows arrive as drafts deliberately.

How do I tell whether it ran at all?

Run history. If there is no run, the trigger did not fire or the condition excluded everything. If there is a run, read what it did.

How do I test a condition without waiting for a trigger?

Dry-run it and look at the match count. Zero matches is the answer to most 'it does not run' questions.

An action failed. Can I just retry it?

Yes, and for a transient failure that is the fix. Read why it failed first — a retry does not help if the cause is a missing prerequisite.