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Temporal Visibility

This page provides an overview of Temporal Visibility.

Support, stability, and dependency info
  • For Temporal Server v1.19 and earlier, all supported databases for Visibility provide standard Visibility features, and an Elasticsearch database is required for advanced Visibility features.
  • For Temporal Server v1.20 and later, advanced Visibility features are enabled on all supported SQL databases, in addition to Elasticsearch.
  • In Temporal Server v1.21 and later, standard Visibility is no longer in development, and we recommend migrating to a database that supports Advanced Visibility features. The Visibility configuration for the Temporal Service has been updated and Dual Visibility is enabled. For details, see Visibility store setup.

The term Visibility, within the Temporal Platform, refers to the subsystems and APIs that enable an operator to view, filter, and search for Workflow Executions that currently exist within a Temporal Service.

The Visibility store in your Temporal Service stores persisted Workflow Execution Event History data and is set up as a part of your Persistence store to enable listing and filtering details about Workflow Executions that exist on your Temporal Service.

With Temporal Server v1.21, you can set up Dual Visibility to migrate your Visibility store from one database to another.

Support for separate standard and advanced Visibility setups will be deprecated from Temporal Server v1.21 onwards. Check Supported databases for updates.

What is standard Visibility?​

Standard Visibility, within the Temporal Platform, is the subsystem and APIs that list Workflow Executions by a predefined set of filters.

Open Workflow Executions can be filtered by a time constraint and either a Workflow Type, Workflow Id, or Run Id.

Closed Workflow Executions can be filtered by a time constraint and either a Workflow Type, Workflow Id, Run Id, or Execution Status (Completed, Failed, Timed Out, Terminated, Canceled, or Continued-As-New).

Custom Search Attributes are not supported with Standard Visibility.

Support for standard Visibility is deprecated beginning with Temporal Server v1.21. For updates, check Supported databases.

What is advanced Visibility?​

Visibility, within the Temporal Platform, is the subsystem and APIs that enable the listing, filtering, and sorting of Workflow Executions through a custom SQL-like List Filter.

  • In Temporal Service version 1.20 and later, advanced Visibility is available on SQL databases like MySQL (version 8.0.17 and later) and PostgreSQL (version 12 and later), in addition to support for Elasticsearch.
  • For Temporal Server versions 1.19.1 and earlier, you must integrate with ElasticSearch to use advanced Visibility. Elasticsearch takes on the Visibility request load, relieving potential performance issues. We highly recommend operating a Temporal Service with Elasticsearch for any use case that spawns more than just a few Workflow Executions.
  • On Temporal Cloud, advanced Visibility is enabled by default for all users.