Is there a way to create an automation that triggers when there are

NO flows in certain states for a certain time

? Maybe there is another more elegant solution, but the idea is to shut down certain resources if there are no flows running, pending or late etc. 🙂

You can use a custom trigger to accomplish this, in particular a trigger woith a proactive posture. so after some terminam flow run state, expect a flow run to enter a scheduled or running state, and if NOT, then fire the automation. you can read more about it here. https://docs.prefect.io/2.11.0/cloud/automations/

OK, I read the documentation but did not yet understand how the proactiveness works

i hear you on more examples, i can get a catalogue together in the near term. nice job on the trigger - a few tweaks delete the whole for_each key. this says that it should evaluate the trigger for each flow run to go from success -> running, you actually want to execute the action if any flow run goes into running after a success, not just that flow run.

prefect.flow-run.Success

is actually not an event. what you’re looking for is prefect.flow-run.Completed. you can see the recent events in the event feed.

Thanks for the feedback and for collecting more examples! I made the changes you suggested. However, I want the automation to

trigger a flow run, if no other flow switches to the Running state within 3 minutes

Does the following code do that?

{
  "match": {
    "prefect.resource.id": "prefect.flow-run.*"
  },
  "match_related": {},
  "after": [
    "prefect.flow-run.Completed"
  ],
  "expect": [
    "prefect.flow-run.Running"
  ],
  "posture": "Proactive",
  "threshold": 1,
  "within": 180
}

yep. that looks right to me!

Alright, will "test in production" 😄

Sorry, I think I misunderstood the initial requirements. what the automation we discussed will achieve is to execute the action when any flow run emits a completion event, and then no flow run emits a running event within the time period. Other flow runs that were running from before the 3 minute window may continue to run and wouldn’t send a running event (we send a running event when the flow run ENTERs running, not continuously throughout runtime) so the action could fire even with flows running. I think that automations may not actually be the best fit here, in retrospect. Perhaps a flow that polls the /flow_runs endpoint and gets all running flows would be useful. if the flow returns no running flows, than execute a subflow that does what you need the action to do. Does that sound closer?

Yeah, that sounds better!