Using Nintex Insights/KYFW to find your workflows

Overview 

When planning the migration of workflows to NAC, it’s crucial to determine which workflows need to be moved. Whether participating in a Nintex Upgrade Center-led migration or managing the process independently, defining your workflow inventory beforehand ensures only the necessary workflows are included. This also presents an opportunity for workflow inventory clean-up. 

By focusing solely on required workflows, you can avoid unnecessary work and optimize resource allocation. For Upgrade Center-led migrations, selecting the correct workflows maximizes the value of migration assistance hours, allowing the Nintex Delivery team to focus on the right tasks. 

This article provides guidance on using Nintex Insights and KYWF (Know Your Workflow) scripts (for SharePoint On-Premises) to identify and assess the business criticality of your workflows. 

Nintex Insights 

Nintex Insights is a workflow and forms analytics solution where you can view lenses and process intelligence reports on workflows executed in Nintex Automation Cloud, Nintex for O365 and Nintex for SharePoint On-premises.  

This data will easily let you identify e.g.  

• The most run workflows 

• The highest action count workflows 

• The biggest users of the products 

To view analytics of your workflow data, you must add a data connection in Nintex Insights.  

For more information on creating data connections, see the Data connections help topic. 

Step 1: Request Nintex Insights workspace from your Nintex representative 

Nintex Insights is included with your Nintex Automation Cloud license. To activate it, contact your account manager or Migration Technical Engagement Manager. You will need to provide: 

1. Your preferred tenant name 

2. Name and contact email of the workspace owner 

Once the workspace is activated, you will receive a confirmation email from Nintex with next steps. 

Step 2: Connect workflow data  

To view analytics of your workflow data, you must add a data connection in Nintex Insights. For more information on creating data connections, see the Data connections help topic. 

We recommend that connections are added for all the tenants in your environment that contain Nintex workflows and Nintex forms. 

Once these connections have been setup, you will see telemetry data on the Inventory tab in your Insights dashboard. 

Some of the details on the Inventory dashboard: 

• Workflow inventory 

• Published workflows by month 

• DocGen actions for workflow 

• Forms Inventory 

• SharePoint Online forms inventory 

• Workflow instance usage 

TIP: Data can be exported to CSV to share internally and use for planning. 

Nintex Insights also provides Instance data and Actions data on a workflow level, as well as Forms information.  

Step 3: Find workflows for migration  

Now that your tenants have been connected to Nintex Insights, you will be able to see all your workflows and their locations. 

Navigating to the Workflow and Instances pages will present workflow information, to help you locate your workflows on your SharePoint tenants and understand if they should be migrated to NAC. 

Step 4: How to interpret Nintex Insights data for migration 

WORKFLOWS 

The Workflows page displays workflow publishing and performance details for your Nintex for SharePoint, Nintex for Office 365 and Nintex Automation Cloud platform capabilities. 

Before you start You must add your Nintex platform capability as a data connection in Nintex Insights to view the data. For more information, see Data connections. 

Note: If data inconsistencies occur between Nintex for Office 365 and Nintex Insights, check the following: 

• The Workflow or Forms app should not be deleted for the site or for site collection. If it is deleted, Nintex loses the permission to query SharePoint to reconcile your workflows and forms for that site. 

• The Nintex app permission should not be removed from the Nintex for Office 365 site permissions. 

TIP: Use the Filter option to search for specific workflows by certain criteria. 

The Workflows section displays the following details: 

Now that you have found all the workflows in your estate, the following questions should be considered to help you understand and interpret your data. Please note that these are guiding questions only – the answer to whether a workflow should be migrated will remain the responsibility of the customer. 

Questions to consider 

• Are there any workflows published as Development, that are actually Production workflows? If yes, then they will most likely need to be included in the migration. 

• For customers that have both SharePoint Online and SharePoint On-premises workflows that they want to migrate to NAC, the Data Connection Type will provide them insight to where all their workflows are located. 

• Are there workflows in a location e.g. a deprecated Site/Site Collection, that is an indication that this workflow should/shouldn’t be migrated over to NAC? 

• What is the last published date of a workflow? Is this an indication that this workflow should/shouldn’t be migrated over to NAC? 

• Who is the Published By? Is this an indication that this workflow should/shouldn’t be migrated over to NAC? 

TIP: We recommend that you export the data to CSV. This will allow you to filter and sort the data according to your needs. 

INSTANCES 

The Instances page displays details of all workflow instances initiated during the selected date range in the Nintex capabilities for which you have created data connections. 

TIP: Use the Filter option to search for specific workflows by certain criteria 

The Instances section displays the following details: 

Now that you have found all the workflows in your estate, the following questions should be considered to help you understand and interpret your data. Please note that these are guiding questions only – the answer to whether a workflow should be migrated will remain the responsibility of the customer. 

Questions to consider 

• For customers that have both SharePoint Online and SharePoint On-premises workflows that they want to migrate to NAC, the Data Connection Type will provide them insight to where all their workflows are located. 

• Are there workflows in a location e.g. a deprecated Site/ Site Collection, that is an indication that this workflow should/shouldn’t be migrated over to NAC? 

• The Total Instances value is a good indication of which workflows have been active for the past 12 months for O365 tenants, or the past 90 days for Onprem tenant.​ 

• If the workflow has run thousands of times, it's probably worth migrating, and if it's only run once in the last nine months it is probably worth reviewing the workflow to understand if it's not supposed to run very often, or if it should be deprecated prior to the migration. 

TIP: We recommend that you export the data to CSV. This will allow you to filter and sort the data according to your needs. 

KYWF (Know Your Workflow)  

The Nintex Know Your Workflow (KYWF) script is a handy tool provided by Nintex that allows you to get a better understanding of the workflows that are running within your SharePoint On-Prem environment. For example, you can view reports that describe the number of workflows published, number of actions per workflow published, over a specific time period, etc.  

Step 1: Request the KYWF script  

If you are looking to migrate or just to get an overall view of your Nintex for SharePoint On-premises landscape, you should reach out to your Nintex Account Manager or Modernization Technical Engagement Manager for assistance. 

They will request the script and you will receive an email with steps to follow. 

Step 2: Run the KYWF script  

The email you receive in Step 1 will contain all the necessary information for you to run the KYWF script. 

Note: If you have more than one SharePoint farm, you need to run the KYWF script against every farm. 

The email you received will contain details on how to submit the Script results back to the Nintex team for importing and analysis. 

Once that is done, you will receive an email confirmation that your report is ready for viewing. 

Step 3: Understanding the output of the KYWF script  

Once the data from your SharePoint farm(s) has been imported and analyzed, you will be able to access these results with a link to a PowerBI report. 

The report will show you the following details: 

Workflows by size 

We use a T-Shirt sizing model to categorize workflows by number of workflow actions 

• Small (0 – 5 workflow actions) 

• Medium (6 – 25 workflow actions) 

• Large (26 - 100 workflow actions) 

• X- Large (100+ workflow actions) 

Action count by workflow size & Upgrade parity 

The report considers the workflow action parity differences to NAC from the source platform and this section of the report will categorize the workflows by size and how compatible they are for migrating to NAC. 

• Ready - actions in Nintex Workflow for SharePoint On-Premises are mapped to an equivalent action in Nintex Automation Cloud where an equivalent action is available 

• Compatible - Where a directly equivalent action does not exist in Nintex Automation Cloud with similar configuration settings, one of the following scenarios will apply: 

A single action may be mapped to multiple actions to achieve the same outcome. 

Actions that have an equivalent in Nintex Automation Cloud with differences in configuration settings or slight differences in functionality will be mapped to the equivalent action in Nintex Automation Cloud, however, further review of the configuration or reconfiguration of the action will be required. 

Blocked - Actions that do not exist or do not have an equivalent action in Nintex Automation Cloud will be replaced with a placeholder action to ensure the workflow design is retained. 

If a placeholder is added to your migrated workflow where an equivalent action does not exist, try one of the following recommendations to update your workflow: 

• Review our Upgrade to Nintex Automation Cloud community site for articles on how to upgrade specific actions 

• Check if the action has a recommended alternative here (see the upgrade details column). 

• Replicate the action using a custom connector built on the Nintex Xtensions framework. For more information, see the Nintex Xtensions help documentation. 

• Browse the Solution Accelerator Gallery for templates you can use to build a connector. 

• Submit a request to make the action available in Nintex Automation Cloud via User Voice. User Voice is a platform that you can use to submit feedback and requests for all Nintex products. 

 
Upgrade blockers by Workflow size 

This section provides the workflow actions that fall into the Blocked category w.r.t. to  Upgrade Parity. 

The details include: 

• The workflow actions that are blocked 

• The number of workflows affected by each blocked action 

Blocked actions - Actions that do not exist or do not have an equivalent action in Nintex Automation Cloud will be replaced with a placeholder action to ensure the workflow design is retained. 

If a placeholder is added to your migrated workflow where an equivalent action does not exist, try one of the following recommendations to update your workflow: 

• Review our Upgrade to Nintex Automation Cloud community site for articles on how to upgrade specific actions 

• Check if the action has a recommended alternative here (see the upgrade details column). 

• Replicate the action using a custom connector built on the Nintex Xtensions framework. For more information, see the Nintex Xtensions help documentation. 

• Browse the Solution Accelerator Gallery for templates you can use to build a connector. 

• Submit a request to make the action available in Nintex Automation Cloud via User Voice. User Voice is a platform that you can use to submit feedback and requests for all Nintex products. 

 Top 10 workflow executions 

The workflows that have the 10 highest number of executions in the last 90 days (SharePoint On-premises) and 12 months (SharePoint Online) 

This provides guidance on the business critical workflows. 

Workflow details table 

This table provides details on the SharePoint Site locations of the workflows. 

Considerations 

When deciding on which workflows to migrate first, based on this telemetry data, we recommend that you consider both instance and action counts. 

• Do start with workflows that are fairly low in instance counts. You might want to start with a workflow that is less business critical until you are more comfortable with migrating to NAC. 

• Do start with workflows that are small to medium in action counts, until you are more comfortable with migrating to NAC. 

• Once you are comfortable with the migration process, you can move onto workflows that are larger and more complex. 

Need more support?  

If this all sounds overwhelming, or you do not have the capacity to complete your migration to Nintex Automation Cloud before the deprecation/end-of life dates, contact your Account Manager to explore available options for migration assistance from our dedicated team of experts in the Upgrade Center.  

Additional Resources  

• Help Documentation for Upgrading to Nintex Automation Cloud (Commercial)  

• Help Documentation for Upgrading to Nintex Automation Cloud (Government)  

• Prioritizing Your Workflows for Migration to Nintex Automation Cloud