The automation failure nobody sees
An automation failure rarely announces itself. A check after every due run means the right person hears before a customer does.
Why automation failure stays quiet
An automation failure does not send an error to anyone. A login expires, a form changes, a tool updates, and the job just stops running.
Reminders stop going out. Invoices stop being sent. The first person to notice is a customer asking what happened.
What we built: an automation health monitor
We built an automation health monitor for a national services business. On a schedule, it checks the last run of every automation, along with the health of the live site and app.
A failure goes to one named owner. The alert never sits in a shared inbox.
Google's reliability engineers set the same order: watch for what is broken first, then look for why (Google SRE book, 2016).
How it runs day to day
The monitor treats silence as a failure.
Three checks it makes on its own
-
A check on every job
Each scheduled job is checked for a recent successful run after it was due.
-
An alert with a name on it
The owner of the job hears first, with what failed and when.
-
Site and app checked too
The live site and app get checked on the same schedule as the jobs.
Want to hear about a stop before your customers do? Book a 30 minute call and we look at your automations together.
What changed for the business
Customers are no longer the first to find an automation failure.
Nobody opens each tool to check it still works. The monitor does that on its schedule.
Do it yourself or have it built
Start with a list of every automation you rely on and who owns each one. Then check each one weekly for a recent successful run.
Silence is the failure. A nightly job with no run in the last 24 hours has stopped, even if no error ever arrived.
To have it checked for you on a schedule, see our automation monitoring system. We quote one price after a 30 minute call about your setup.
Operations
Find a stopped automation before a customer does.
One 30 minute call about the automations you rely on. We tell you what the build takes and quote one price.
- What you get
- A written plan of what this build takes on your setup.
- How it is priced
- The call is free. We quote one price for the build after it.
- What you bring
- A short list of the tools this job runs through today.
Prefer to write? Send us a message.
Questions about automation failure
Does a small business need to watch for automation failure?
Any business with an automation that touches customers or money does. The more customers a job reaches, the sooner a stop costs you.
Will I hear about a job that never started, even with no error?
Most stop at a step outside your control: an expired login, a changed form, a tool update. The job never starts, so nothing reports a failure.
Who should get the alerts?
One named person per job. An alert sent to everyone tends to get read by nobody.
Is a weekly check enough for the jobs I rely on?
Match the check to the job. A daily job gets checked daily, a monthly invoice run the day after it is due.