What checks should be in place to ensure automation runs correctly?

Automation is supposed to run quietly in the background while you focus on other things. The problem is, that silence can hide real issues. A broken trigger fires zero emails and no one notices. A misconfigured loop fires thousands. Without the right checks in place, you might not find out until your deliverability takes a hit or a subscriber gets ten welcome emails in a row.

Here's what you actually want to monitor.

Volume monitoring

Set alerts for volume that falls significantly above or below your normal range. Zero sends usually means a trigger broke. A sudden spike often points to a duplicate trigger loop. A rough rule of thumb: alert if daily send volume drops below 50% of your 7-day average, or jumps above 200%.

Trigger validation

Check that triggers fire for the right events and only those events. If your welcome flow should fire when someone confirms their email, verify that's the exact condition being met. Track your trigger-to-send ratio over time. If that ratio shifts unexpectedly, something upstream changed.

Timing and delays

Audit that your configured delays are actually running correctly. A 24-hour delay that becomes a 24-minute delay (or never fires at all) changes the whole experience for the reader. Time-zone logic is one of the most common culprits here. If you're sending across multiple regions, test it explicitly. Clock drift between systems can also quietly throw off your scheduled sends.

Error monitoring

Watch for elevated bounce rates or API errors in any connected systems. Personalization failures are worth flagging too. An email that sends with a blank first name field (or worse, a raw merge tag like {{first_name}}) damages trust more than it might seem. Most ESPs let you set alert thresholds. Use them.

Regular logic audits

Automation logic that made sense six months ago may not match your current setup. Suppression lists get updated. Segments change. Data fields get renamed. A quarterly review of your active automations catches things that monitoring alone won't find, like a flow that technically runs but targets the wrong audience.

The goal isn't to babysit every send. It's to set up the right signals so that when something breaks, you hear about it before your subscribers do.

Not sure which alerts your ESP supports? Our SOS hotline is free if you want a second set of eyes on your setup.