I lost half a day to an n8n workflow that was "working." It never ran.

Description and use

A liveness‑check script detects when an n8n workflow is unpublished or missing and sends a single email on state change, avoiding alert fatigue.

Problem

A scheduled n8n workflow stopped running silently after being unpublished, causing missed executions without any error alerts.

Outcome

The liveness check script reliably detects when a workflow is unpublished or missing, sending a single email on state change and avoiding alert fatigue.

Workflow

• 1. Deploy n8n 2.43.6 with PostgreSQL 16 on EC2. 2. Import and publish a one‑minute scheduled workflow. 3. Unpublish the workflow to simulate a silent failure. 4. Run a Python script every 15 minutes that: a. GET /workflows to verify existence and active flag. b. GET /executions?workflowId=<id>&limit=1 to check last run. c. GET /executions?workflowId=<id>&status=success&limit=1 to confirm recent success. 5. Compare current state with previous state; if changed, email notification. 6. Re‑publish the workflow and observe the script detect the change and send a recovery email.

Evidence

I did not want to take this on faith, so I ran it.

Source

Zero. Two and a half minutes, at least two scheduled runs missed, and the execution count did not move by one.

Source

A separate scheduled workflow, every 15 minutes, reads the n8n public API and answers four questions for each workflow on a watch list.

Source

Only email on change.

Source