Track how often things go wrong, not just when

Watching individual failures one at a time hides the bigger picture. Instead, track how often an automation runs into trouble compared to how often it runs clean, so you can see whether things are getting better or worse over time.

This matters because a single failure might be a fluke — a slow server, a one-off typo, bad luck. A rising pattern of trouble is never a fluke. It usually means something upstream has shifted: a partner changed their process, your customers started behaving differently, or the automation is aging out of what it was built for. You only see that pattern if you are tracking trouble over time instead of reacting to each incident on its own. I keep a simple tally next to my own run log, and watching that number move has told me more than any single incident ever could.

A simple tally next to your run log is enough to start noticing trends.

Try this today: start a simple tally next to your run log that marks each time something needed a fix, so you can watch the trend build.