Question

When an alert times out, the value for the statusChanged.by.id output of a status trigger in Flow Designer is supposed to be null. Why does the Activity Panel show the value of the output for an alert that timed out as the person who initiated the alert?

Environment

All versions of xMatters

Answer

This is, in fact, a bug that is currently being addressed.

The statusChanged.by.id output of the status trigger contains the UUID of the person who changed the status of alert. When an alert status changes automatically such as by timeout, however, the value for the statusChanged.by.id output is supposed to be null, while the other statusChanged.by.* outputs (".targetname", ".firstName", and .lastName") should contain values indicating the sender of the alert. 

In some cases, however, the statusChanged.by.id output would also contain the sender's UUID when the alert timed out. The good news is that a fix for this is already in the works and should be applied very soon. 

This may, however, affect any flows that were relying on a UUID in that specific output. Your flow will now properly return a null value, which may affect downstream steps. Be sure to check any status triggers in your deployment to make sure you aren't relying on an incorrect output.