Building Custom Ingestion Workflows

Custom knowledge ingestion brings content into your knowledge base from systems that don’t have a first-party Serval connector — internal wikis, knowledge APIs, proprietary tools, or legacy systems. You point a knowledge ingestion workflow at the source, and Serval keeps the content synced, indexed, and searchable by the help desk agent.

How it works

A workflow extracts documents

A published knowledge ingestion workflow calls your system’s API and returns documents as markdown — each with a display name, a stable ID, and a URL used for citations. Workflows support both full syncs and incremental (delta) syncs.

Serval indexes the content

On each sync, Serval chunks and embeds every document through the same pipeline as first-party connectors. Unchanged documents are skipped, and documents removed from the source are cleaned up.

A read-only knowledge base mirrors the source

Serval automatically creates one read-only knowledge base per custom source, listed under External Connections in the Knowledge Bases tab. Each synced document appears as a read-only page, so people can browse exactly what the agent sees. Pages link back to the original source.

Once synced, the agent searches the content on every relevant request and cites the source documents in its answers.

Setting up a custom source

Publish a knowledge ingestion workflow

A workflow author builds and publishes a knowledge ingestion workflow — see Knowledge ingestion workflows for what it must return. If you don’t have one yet, the setup dialog links you to Catalyst to author it.

Add the custom source

In the sidebar, open Knowledge and select the Knowledge Sources tab
Click Manage sources, open the Available tab, and choose Add custom knowledge source
Configure the source:

Field	What it does
Name	Display name for the source (defaults to the workflow’s name)
Logo	Optional — a website domain to fetch a brand logo from
Workflow	The published knowledge ingestion workflow that extracts the documents
AI context only	If on, the content is used by the agent but never shown as a browsable knowledge base

Sync and verify

Trigger a sync with Sync now, then ask the agent a test question that should be answered from the new content. Confirm the answer cites the right document.

Managing a custom source

Each custom source appears as a card in the Knowledge Sources tab showing its last sync time, sync-in-progress state, or any error. From the card you can:

Sync now — run an immediate sync instead of waiting for the schedule
View Workflow — jump to the ingestion workflow definition
Settings — edit the source configuration

Source settings include these toggles:

Setting	What it controls
Searching	Whether the agent uses this source’s content to answer help tickets
Cite Document Links	Whether the agent includes links to the source documents in its answers
AI context only	Whether the synced content is hidden from human-facing surfaces

Deleting a custom source permanently removes the source and all of its synced data.

When to use custom ingestion vs. the alternatives

Situation	Use
Content lives in Notion, Confluence, Google Drive, SharePoint, ServiceNow, Zendesk, or Freshservice	Connected source — no workflow needed
Content lives in a system with an API but no Serval connector	Custom knowledge ingestion
Content doesn’t exist in written form yet	Author it in Serval

Learn more

Knowledge ingestion workflows — authoring reference for the workflow itself
Connect to External Sources — first-party connectors that don’t need a workflow
Custom Apps — pair a custom app with your ingestion workflow

​How it works

​Setting up a custom source

​Managing a custom source

​When to use custom ingestion vs. the alternatives

​Learn more

How it works

Setting up a custom source

Managing a custom source

When to use custom ingestion vs. the alternatives

Learn more