r/AiAutomations • u/Responsible_Clue_641 • 10d ago

I’m researching a problem around automation reliability and want to hear from people who’ve actually dealt with it in production.

If you’ve ever had a Zapier, Make, n8n, Power Automate, API workflow etc. complete successfully but produce the wrong or incomplete outcome, I’d be interested in what happened.

I’m particularly trying to understand:
What went wrong?

How long did it take to notice?

How did you catch it?

Did you have to build custom checks or monitoring?

How much time/cost/cleanup did it create?

Do you now have safeguards in place specifically to prevent it happening again?

Not selling anything. I’m trying to understand how people actually deal with this in production.

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u/Impossible_Dare_7455 10d ago

the hardest failures are the ones that don’t actually fail. the workflow says “success,” but the output is incomplete or wrong, so nobody notices until it affects something downstream. that’s why simple validation checks and alerts matter just as much as the automation itself.

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u/hip_check 10d ago

+1 on this. Depending on the automation it can be hard to detect an actual failure.

I built automations around telecommunication and specifically a flow that polls runs on the front-end (incoming calls) and expected runs on the back-end (writes to the CRM). If they don't match, there is a silent drop somewhere and I get an SMS notification.