What is a spoke?
A spoke is a bundled set of Flow Designer actions for a specific external system or service. Instead of writing a RESTMessageV2 script to post a Slack message, you drag in the "Post Message" action from the Slack spoke and fill in the parameters.
Included spokes (common)
- Slack — post messages, create channels, manage users
- Microsoft Teams — post messages, create meetings
- Jira — create/update issues, add comments
- ServiceNow — create/update any record across instances
- Email — send formatted emails with attachments
- REST — generic spoke for any REST API (requires no specific spoke)
- SOAP — generic spoke for SOAP services
Using the REST spoke for any API
When there is no dedicated spoke for a system, the REST spoke handles any HTTP API:
- Add Action: REST → REST Step
- Set the Connection Alias (credential store reference)
- Configure: method, URL, headers, request body
- Map response fields to output variables
Setting up credentials for a spoke
Spokes use Connection and Credential Aliases to store authentication securely. Configure these at Connections & Credentials > Credentials — never hardcode credentials in flow variables.
The HTTP Response step
After a REST spoke action, use the response data pills to extract values. The spoke returns: status_code, response_body (as string), and parsed response fields if the spoke is pre-built.
Step: Slack - Post Message
channel: #incidents
text: "New P1 Incident: " + trigger.number
Output: message_ts (use for threading follow-ups)Error handling with spoke actions
Wrap spoke actions in Try steps. HTTP calls fail — network issues, authentication expiry, rate limits. A Flow that sends 200 Slack messages then fails on the 201st due to rate limiting needs a fault handler.