How do I get alerted when an automation silently stops?
Last updated · Written by the Bot Office team; it names Bot Office where it fits and says where it does not.
The short answer
Use a heartbeat (also called a dead man's switch): have the automation send a small signal every time it runs, and alert when the signal does not arrive within its usual interval. Error alerts alone miss this case, because an automation that never starts never errors.
Send both kinds of alert, "failed" and "quiet", to the chat channel the team already reads, such as Slack or Teams.
Steps (with any tool)
- Write down each automation's rhythm. Hourly, every weekday at 9:00, on every new ticket. Event-driven bots need a looser window than scheduled ones.
- Send a signal on every run. A last step that posts "finished" (and a step on the error path that posts "failed"). In n8n, an error workflow catches failures.
- Alert on silence. A monitor that expects the signal and alerts when it is late. Hosted heartbeat services work this way; so does a scheduled check of the last run time.
- Post alerts where people are. Slack incoming webhooks post to a channel from a URL. In Microsoft Teams, the old connector-based incoming webhooks were retired; use a Workflows (Power Automate) webhook instead.
- Say what to do. An alert should name the bot, how long it has been quiet and a link to look. Otherwise people learn to ignore it.
How Bot Office does it
Bot Office learns each bot's rhythm from its reports and flags a bot whose silence is well past it (and any bot silent for a day). Add a webhook with "format":"slack" or "format":"teams" and the events bot.quiet, bot.failed and approval.requested arrive as one readable line with a link to the office (by id, never a key).
Set it up on the connections page of your office, or with POST /v1/workspaces/:id/webhooks (the agent guide has the details and the signature check for your own endpoint). Routines can also put a task on a bot's desk on a schedule, and the reports show expected against done.
Questions
What counts as quiet?
Silence well past the bot's own usual gap between reports, so a bot that runs weekly is not flagged after an hour.
Can I send alerts somewhere other than chat?
Yes: the json format is a signed envelope (HMAC-SHA256) to any public https endpoint.
Does it read my workflow data?
No. It keeps status only: bot names, event types and short task titles.
Sources
- Healthchecks.io documentation (heartbeat monitoring)
- Slack: sending messages using incoming webhooks
- Microsoft: retirement of Office 365 connectors in Teams
- n8n error handling
Facts about other products are from their own documentation, linked above, as read on the date at the top. Bot Office is not certified or endorsed by their makers.