Watchers and Alerts

Watcher purpose

Watchers help teams monitor store and site conditions without waiting for a manual report. Good watchers have a narrow condition, a clear owner, a known review cadence, and an escalation path. Avoid creating alerts that no one owns.

Alert review

Each alert should explain what happened, why it matters, and what the operator should review next. The Watchers feature explains the product area, while the low-stock watcher tutorial shows a concrete WooCommerce example.

Noise control

Pause or revise watchers that trigger repeatedly without action. Connect watcher review to audit log review when a recommendation leads to a product, coupon, support, or workflow change.

Quick reference

• Use this page when turning repeatable WordPress, WooCommerce, marketing, support, reporting, agent, or tool work into a controlled process.
• Do not enable unattended write behavior, external calls, or customer-facing output before failure handling and approval ownership are clear.

Scope limits

• This page does not justify unattended execution when trigger scope, owner response, failure handling, or approval behavior is unclear.
• Use it to narrow repeatable work before expanding to write actions, external services, or customer-facing output.

Owner and cadence

• Primary owner: operations lead for the affected workflow, watcher, agent, playbook, or custom tool.
• Review cadence: before first run, after failed runs, after provider changes, and during monthly workflow review.
• Escalate when workflow execution writes production data, repeats failures, sends customer-facing output, or runs without a visible owner.

Access and data boundary

• Grant workflow, watcher, playbook, agent, and custom-tool access by role, record type, launch surface, and risk level.
• Start with read-only, staging, simulation, or notification-only runs before allowing production writes, external webhooks, or unattended execution.

Production checklist

• Create watchers only for conditions with a named owner, review cadence, and escalation path.
• Route alerts to monitored channels and revise noisy watchers quickly.
• Define trigger, owner, input data, output, approval requirement, retry behavior, failure notification, and kill switch before enabling a workflow.
• Start with read-only runs or staging examples until the team has reviewed successful traces and audit records.

Acceptance checks

• Every alert explains what happened, why it matters, and what the operator should inspect next.
• Repeated alerts lead to a documented action, threshold change, or watcher pause.
• The workflow or agent has a named owner who can pause it and explain its last run.
• Failures produce enough audit, diagnostics, and notification context for another operator to respond.

Failure modes to test

• Test missing trigger data, duplicate runs, retry exhaustion, failed notifications, stale sources, permission denial, tool errors, and provider limits.
• Confirm write actions remain paused or approval-gated when simulation, staging, or first-run evidence fails.

Evidence to capture

• Record trigger, owner, input scope, affected records, approval point, run ID or timestamp, output artifact, and failure response.
• Capture simulation, staging, notification-only, or first production run evidence before expanding workflow scope.

Decision record

• Record the workflow decision, trigger, owner, input scope, output artifact, approval point, retry rule, failure notification, and kill switch.
• Include the first-run evidence, run ID or timestamp, cost expectation, expansion criteria, and the condition that keeps write actions paused.

Stop or rollback path

Pause workflow execution until trigger, owner, approval, run state, and failure handling are documented.

Monitoring window

• Monitor first runs, retries, costs, failures, alert volume, queued work, and owner response time.
• Review run history before enabling write actions, more triggers, or broader records.

Expansion criteria

• Expand workflow execution only after first-run history shows expected output, manageable alert volume, known cost, and clear failure handling.
• Write-capable steps remain approval-gated until staging, simulation, or notification-only runs are stable.

Common mistakes

• Turning a useful prompt into automation before defining trigger, owner, input scope, approval rule, and failure handling.
• Ignoring noisy alerts or failed runs until operators stop trusting the workflow surface.

Common questions

What is the main decision this page supports?

The page helps the team decide whether ownership, evidence, access, failure handling, monitoring, and rollback are clear enough for production use.

Who should own this decision?

The operations owner should own the workflow, with specialist reviewers for customer, commerce, content, support, or tool impact.

What should stop the rollout?

Stop when trigger scope, owner, run state, approval behavior, failure response, or write capability is unclear.

Related operations

• Configure delivery with Mail and Notification Settings.
• Use Workflow Safety before enabling recurring workflows.
• Use Workflow Safe Mode and Kill Switches before production workflow rollout.
• Use Model Evaluation and Regression Review before broad agent or workflow rollout.
• Use Playbooks and Quick Actions for repeatable structured tasks.
• Use Prompt Template Governance before sharing reusable instructions.
• Use Playbook Import Export and Agency Reuse before reusing client workflows.
• Use Tool Validation and Schema Testing before exposing custom tools.