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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.

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How it works

1

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.
2

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.
3

A read-only knowledge base mirrors the source

Serval automatically creates one read-only knowledge base per custom source, listed under From your apps in the Knowledge sidebar, or under For AI only when AI context only is on. 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.

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Setting up a custom source

1

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.
2

Add the custom source

  1. In the sidebar, open Knowledge and select the Knowledge Sources tab
  2. Click Manage sources, open the Available tab, and choose Add custom knowledge source
  3. Configure the source:
3

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.

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

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When to use custom ingestion vs. the alternatives

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Learn more