Monitoring and Maintenance
A live workflow needs a heartbeat monitor. Here's how to keep yours healthy.
What You'll Learn
- What to monitor and how often
- Setting up alerts that matter (not noise)
- Scheduled maintenance rhythms
- When to refactor vs. rebuild a workflow
Launching Is the Beginning, Not the End
The most dangerous moment for a workflow is the week after launch, when everyone assumes it's working because nobody's complained yet. Workflows fail silently. An API changes its response format. A rate limit gets tightened. A data source adds a new field that breaks your parser. Without monitoring, these failures accumulate unseen.
Monitoring isn't paranoia — it's professionalism.
The Four Vital Signs
Success Rate: What percentage of workflow runs complete successfully? Anything below 95% needs investigation. Track this daily.
Execution Time: How long does each run take? Sudden increases often signal upstream problems — an API slowing down, a database growing too large, a step hitting retry loops.
Data Volume: Are you processing the expected number of items? A sudden drop might mean your trigger stopped firing. A sudden spike might mean duplicate events.
Error Patterns: Not just how many errors, but which errors and when. Three timeout errors at 3am every night? That's a pattern worth investigating.
Signal vs. Noise
Bad alerting is worse than no alerting. If every minor hiccup sends a notification, you'll start ignoring them all — including the critical ones. Set alert thresholds that match actual impact. A single retry? Not worth a ping. Three consecutive failures? That's an alert. Success rate dropping below 90%? That's a page.
Categorize your alerts: Info (logged, not notified), Warning (notified, not urgent), Critical (immediate attention). Most events should be Info. Few should be Critical. That's healthy.
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