A workflow that runs silently and fails silently is worse than no workflow at all.

Here's why: you build a workflow. It works great. You stop thinking about it. You start depending on it — you expect the morning brief in your inbox, you rely on the triage to keep your inbox clean. Then one day it fails. Not catastrophically — maybe the API returned an error, maybe your API key expired. But nobody told you. The workflow stopped doing its job, and you didn't know.

The next day you notice you didn't get your brief. But you've missed a day. Now you've lost time, maybe made decisions on incomplete information, and you're scrambling to figure out what went wrong.

Monitoring is how you stay in control without babysitting every workflow manually. It's a simple practice: you know when your workflows run, you know when they succeed, and you catch failures early before they cascade.

The Three Monitoring Questions

1. Is it running?

Did the trigger fire? Did the workflow execute?

This is the baseline. If your workflow is supposed to run every morning at 7am but the execution history shows no executions, something's wrong with the trigger.

2. Did it succeed?

Did it complete without errors?

Every execution has a status: success, incomplete, failed, warning. You need to know when this isn't "success."

3. Did it do the right thing?

Were the outputs correct and sensible?

This is the hardest to check automatically. An execution can complete successfully but produce garbage if the AI prompt is broken, or the input data is malformed, or the business logic changed. For this one, you do periodic spot-checks — pull up a few recent executions and actually look at the output.