I spent about a year building an autonomous multi-process agent system for my own use. At some point I wanted to check retroactively whether its success reports were true, and I found I couldn’t: my own log schema had no field pointing at anything outside the log itself. No record id, no commit, nothing. The reports weren’t wrong. They were unverifiable.
Then I found something I hadn’t expected. A failed fetch in Node throws no error. The call goes nowhere, the agent reports done, and the run is green. About 19,000 of those had accumulated before I noticed.
So my question to people running n8n or Make in production, especially for clients: when a node writes to an external system - a CRM record, an invoice, an order - how do you establish that it actually arrived?
Do you read it back afterwards, or do you trust the return value?
I am not asking about monitoring that alerts you when a run fails. That part seems well covered. I mean the other case: everything green, nothing happened.
Curious whether this is a real problem for others or whether I just built mine badly.