What is Automation Monitoring?

Building an automation is only half the job; monitoring is how you know it kept working after deployment. Effective monitoring tracks execution success rate, latency per step, error frequency by type, and volume trends — a sudden spike or drop in run count is often the earliest signal that an upstream system changed underneath the automation. Monitoring differs from logging in purpose: logs are the raw record, monitoring is the active watch that turns log signals into alerts a human actually sees before a small failure becomes a large one. Dashboards that show automation health at a glance, paired with alert thresholds tuned to avoid both silence and noise, are what separate automation that quietly degrades from automation that gets fixed within the hour.