An automation breaks in production and somebody has to fix it. Usually a day or two after the breakage, because nobody was watching. Usually someone reports downstream that "this thing has not been happening all week." Then the scramble.
The same five causes come up over and over.
One: an upstream API changed. The vendor added a field, removed a field, or changed a response shape. The automation was not expecting it. It silently crashes or produces garbage. If the automation has good error handling it alerts. If it does not, it just keeps producing garbage until someone notices.
Two: the data shape changed in a connected system. Somebody added a new value to a dropdown. A currency was changed from USD to a different format. A date format shifted. The automation was relying on a specific shape and the shape is now different.
Three: rate limiting. The automation suddenly gets throttled because it crossed a threshold. Retries hit the same limit. Jobs back up. Eventually the queue fills and new events start getting dropped.
Four: credential rotation. Someone rotated an API key or a password somewhere in the chain and did not update the automation. Every run now fails with an auth error. This is embarrassingly common.
Five: logic drift. The automation was built for a business rule that no longer applies. "Send email to the account owner" used to mean one thing. Now the ownership model has three levels and nobody updated the automation to match.
All five of these are preventable with basic infrastructure. Monitoring that alerts on failure. Versioned integrations that can catch shape changes. Credential management that is centralised, not scattered. Business logic that is documented so when the rule changes someone knows to update the automation.
We tell every client: automation is not a project you ship and walk away from. It is infrastructure you own. If you are not willing to keep owning it, you should not build it, because an automation that breaks silently is worse than no automation at all. An automation you own, maintain, and monitor is one of the best investments a business can make.