FlowWatch
Monitoring for automations that die silently
90 seconds: an automation is switched off — and caught two minutes later. Nobody touches anything.
The problem
When an automation fails loudly, you see an error. When it dies silently, nothing happens — no error, no alert, and the dashboard still says "active". You find out weeks later, when someone asks where the leads went.
The label on the screen is an intention, not a fact.
What it costs
Without monitoring
A workflow is edited. The schedule stops. The screen still says "active".
Leads keep arriving. None reach the CRM. No error anywhere.
"Why did nobody follow up with that lead?"
~40 leads never answered. Found by accident.
With FlowWatch
The same edit. The same silent death.
Slack: "An automation stopped running" — with what changed, and when.
Switched back on. ✅ The issue closes itself.
Total blind time: 2 minutes.
An illustrative scenario. The incidents below actually happened.
Built on real failures
During development the platform reported "active" three times while the schedule was silently dead — the exact failure this was built to catch, happening in-house first.
And once on camera, while filming the demo: the automation was switched off and kept running for another minute. The screen said "off" while the work continued. The gap between the label and the truth goes both ways.
How it works
Four decisions, and what each one buys you:
Never trust the status flag
Health is derived only from real execution timestamps.
The dashboard can't lie to you, because we never ask it.
A false alarm is worse than a missed one
When the monitor can't read data, it stays silent instead of declaring everything dead.
Three wrong alerts and nobody reads the fourth — the real one.
Blame the version that runs
Correlation uses the published version's timestamp, not the draft's — they can be hours apart.
"What broke it" is only useful if it's true.
Every decision is testable
Overdue, severity, cooldown, correlation — pure logic isolated from I/O, 103 unit tests.
The alert you get at 2 AM was decided by proven code.
Questions people ask
How do I know if a business automation stopped working?
Not from the status label — platforms report "active" for workflows whose schedule has silently stopped. The only reliable signal is when the automation last actually ran. If it should run every 15 minutes and the last real run was 40 minutes ago, it is down, whatever the screen says.
Why do automations fail without an error?
An error is raised when something runs and goes wrong. A silent death is different: the trigger never fires at all, so there is nothing to fail and nothing to report. A workflow edit, an expired token or a restarted server can all deregister a schedule without warning.
Can I monitor n8n, Zapier or Make workflows?
Yes. Any platform that exposes execution history through an API can be monitored the same way — by comparing the last real run against the schedule it is supposed to keep. This project is built on self-hosted n8n, but the approach is not platform-specific.
What does automation monitoring cost a business to skip?
The cost is whatever the automation was moving. A dead lead sync means leads stop reaching the CRM while the website keeps collecting them — usually discovered days later, by accident, when someone asks why nobody followed up.
Running automations in your business?
What proves — right now — that all of them are alive? If the answer is "they're marked active", that isn't proof.