Late one night, I watched my n8n chatbot give wrong information to a customer. I saw it happening through the execution logs. Knew it was incorrect. But had no way to intervene.
That’s when I realized: the scariest part of automation isn’t when it fails. It’s when it fails and you’re powerless to fix it.
Every developer who’s built automation knows this feeling. You build something that works 99% of the time in testing, then watch helplessly as it bombs the 1% edge case in production.
For context: I run an education platform and built chatbots with n8n to handle student questions. They work great - until they don’t. And clicking through execution logs one message at a time to monitor conversations? Exhausting.
My question for the community: How do you handle this?
Are you:
- Just accepting that bots will occasionally fail?
- Building custom monitoring dashboards?
- Using execution logs and living with it?
- Logging to database + building UI?
- Something else I haven’t thought of?
Especially curious if you’re building chatbots for clients - what do you show them when they ask “can I see the conversations?”
I ended up building something for myself to solve this (dashboard where I can see conversations and take over when needed). Still learning what works, but happy to share if anyone’s interested.
Mostly just curious how others in the n8n community handle chatbot monitoring and human intervention?
Thanks!