Preview and view automation history on a conversation

The Automation section of the conversation info panel answers two questions agents and admins constantly guess at: “if this event happened right now, which rules would fire on this conversation?” and “what has automation already done here?” Instead of digging through rule configuration or asking an admin, you can check both directly on the conversation.

Opening the Automation section

1. Open a conversation.
2. Open the info panel (the conversation details sidebar).
3. Find the Automation section.

Inside, you’ll see two views: Preview and History. Use the toggle at the top of the section to switch between them.

The Automation section only appears if you have the settings.automation permission. If you don’t see it, ask an admin to grant access.

Preview: dry-run a trigger against this conversation

Preview answers “what would happen if this trigger fired right now?” — without actually running anything. Nothing is executed, no actions run, no data changes on the conversation.

To use it:

1. Switch to the Preview view.
2. Choose a trigger from the dropdown, for example Customer replies, Set to Done, or Tag added.
3. Atender evaluates every automation rule for that trigger against this specific conversation, using the same condition, schedule, and throttle logic the automation engine uses when a rule actually runs.

Each rule in the list shows whether it would fire:

• A solid dot means the rule would fire for this trigger on this conversation right now.
• A dimmed dot means it wouldn’t.

Rules that wouldn’t fire are flagged with why:

• Outside schedule — the rule’s schedule window doesn’t cover the current time.
• Throttle limit — the rule has already run as many times as its throttle allows.

Expand a rule to see its branches (Always / If / Else if / Else) and, for any branch with conditions, each condition with a check or cross next to it showing whether that specific condition is currently met or unmet for this conversation. If a rule would fire, the actions its firing branch would run are shown as chips — so you can see exactly what would happen (e.g., which tag would be added) before it ever does.

Because Preview runs against the real engine logic, it’s the fastest way to debug “why isn’t my rule firing on this conversation” — you can see precisely which condition is failing instead of guessing.

History: what automation actually did

History answers a different question: “what has already run on this conversation?” Switch to the History view to see every rule execution recorded against this conversation, newest first.

Each entry shows:

• The rule name that ran.
• The trigger that caused it to run.
• When it ran, shown as a relative time (e.g., “3 hours ago”).
• The actions it ran, each with a check (succeeded) or cross (failed) so you can tell at a glance if something didn’t go through.

If an action failed, that’s visible directly on the entry — useful for spotting, for example, a tag that failed to apply or a notification that didn’t send, without needing to check the rule’s own execution logs elsewhere.

History captures rule runs that produced at least one action, including actions that only ran after a rule’s wait step resumed, and rules triggered through both normal automation events and manual bulk runs.

Permissions

Both Preview and History require the settings.automation permission. Users without it won’t see the Automation section on the conversation at all.

Important limitation: no backfilled history

History only records activity from when this feature was released onward. Automation runs that happened on a conversation before that point are not shown — there is no backfill. If a conversation has a long history but its Automation → History view looks sparse or empty, that doesn’t necessarily mean automation didn’t touch it; it may simply predate history tracking.

Preview has no such limitation — it always reflects the rules and conditions configured right now, evaluated live against the conversation’s current state.