How to Get Notified When Automations Fail

# How to Get Notified When Automations Fail When an automation action fails — a Send Email step rejected by your provider, a Send SMS blocked by Twilio, a webhook returning 500 — you want to know about it immediately, not when a client tells you they never got their email. TrustPager logs every failure at https://app.trustpager.com/auto/errors, but if nobody's watching that page, failures pile up silently. Error Alerts close that gap by pushing each new failure to the people who need to know. ## Configure recipients Go to https://app.trustpager.com/settings/auto and open the **Error Alerts** tab. Add as many email recipients as you like. Each address gets an email when an automation fails. Add as many SMS recipients as you like. Phone numbers must be in E.164 format with the leading `+`, e.g. `+61431377068`. Changes save automatically as you add or remove recipients. ## What gets sent **Email.** Subject: `Automation error: {action} failed in "{automation name}"`. Body includes the action type, automation name, the full error message, and a direct link to the failed run at `app.trustpager.com/auto/automations/{id}/runs/{run_id}` so you can investigate without hunting. **SMS.** Tight summary in one or two segments: `TrustPager: {action} failed in "{automation name}". {error}. {run URL}`. ## Throttling — no inbox storms If the same error fires 50 times in 10 minutes (a broken automation can do this), you don't get 50 emails. Identical errors are collapsed into one alert per workspace per hour. The next alert in that signature group is delivered an hour later, with the count of suppressed occurrences appended: `+12 more occurrences in last hour`. Different errors fire independently. Same automation but a different action failing? That's a separate alert. ## How the rails work Emails are sent from `noreply@mail.trustpager.net` — a TrustPager-owned address. This is deliberate: if your own email rail is the thing that's broken (Postmark sender signature missing, Gmail OAuth expired), an alert routed through that same rail wouldn't reach you. Using TrustPager's own DKIM-signed domain guarantees the alert always lands. SMS is sent from your workspace's first active phone number. If your workspace has no active phone number, SMS alerts are skipped silently and email still fires. Manage your phone numbers at https://app.trustpager.com/settings/phone. ## Configure via the API Alerts can be set programmatically through the same `update_crm_settings` endpoint as other CRM settings: ``` PATCH /company/crm-settings { "automation_error_notify_emails": ["alerts@yourcompany.com", "ops@yourcompany.com"], "automation_error_notify_phones": ["+61431377068"] } ``` Emails are validated against a standard email regex. Phones are validated against E.164 with leading `+`. Invalid entries are rejected with a `fix` field telling your AI agent what to do. Reading current recipients works through `get_crm_settings`. Both fields appear in the same response shape as `form_completion_notify_emails`. ## Scheduled reports that don't go out The same recipients also get told when an **Auto Schedule** fails or only partly delivers. This one is worth understanding, because it fails differently from everything else. When an automation action fails you usually find out: a client chases the email that never arrived, or a card sits in the wrong place. When a scheduled report fails, nothing arrives, and nothing arriving looks exactly like a quiet day. Nobody investigates an email that did not turn up. You will get one alert per failed run, not one per recipient, so a schedule going out to 900 people that half fails sends you one email rather than 450. It tells you which schedule, how many of its recipients missed out, and links straight to the schedule so you can look at the run and send it again. Two things worth knowing: - **A partly delivered run still alerts.** If 8 of 10 recipients got their digest, you are told about the 2 who did not, and the 8 are not re-sent. - **Nothing is re-sent automatically.** A recipient who may already have received the report is not something to guess at, so the decision to fire it again is yours. Review your schedules and their run history at https://app.trustpager.com/auto/schedules. ## Custom Scripts that fail or never finish A Custom Script step inside an automation gets the same treatment. If the script reports a failure, or dies without reporting anything at all, the same recipients are told. That second case is the one worth having. A script that crashes, or never starts, produces no error and no output. The automation's run history still shows the step fired, so a lost run looks exactly like a healthy one, and a script that silently did not run is indistinguishable from one that ran and found nothing to do. If the script writes to your CRM, that can mean an invoice still being chased weeks later because the step meant to clear it never ran. Alerts arrive on the same recipients, with the same hourly throttling, and link to the automation run so you can see what the script was doing when it stopped. Testing a script from the editor does not alert anyone. You are looking at the result on screen, so there is nothing to tell you. ## Triaging the alerts you receive Once you start getting alerts, see [How to Triage Automation Errors](https://www.trustpager.com/help-center/triage-automation-errors) for the full workflow on the `/auto/errors` page — grouping failures by root cause, retrying runs, and clearing issues from your workspace. ## When alerts don't fire If you're not seeing alerts you expect: - Confirm at https://app.trustpager.com/auto/errors that the failure was actually logged. If the failure isn't there, no alert will have fired. - Confirm your recipients are saved at https://app.trustpager.com/settings/auto — empty list means no alerts. - Check the throttle window. Identical errors within an hour are collapsed by design. - For SMS specifically, confirm your workspace has at least one active phone number at https://app.trustpager.com/settings/phone. No active number means SMS alerts are skipped.