Monitoring Workflows - Passing Name and ID to Sub-Workflow

Feature Requests
1

We’ve been using n8n for a couple of months now and are starting to generate a lot of workflows. In order to keep track of everything, we’ve been adding a few nodes to the end of our workflows to write back workflow name and ID, date, and number of items to a MySQL database (the function, set, and MySQL nodes in the sample workflow below).

We were hoping to create a “monitoring” workflow that would allow us to replace the function, set, and MySQL nodes with an Execute Workflow node. I played with this after reading the forum post about passing parameters between workflows:

https://community.n8n.io/t/pass-parameters-to-execute-workflow/712

I was able to successfully grab the number of items from the previous workflow, but did not see the original workflow ID or name in the Start node data in the new workflow. Is there a way to get these 2 fields for the original workflow from the “monitoring” sub-workflow?

Sample Workflow with Monitoring Fields:

“Monitoring” Sub-Workflow Mock-Up

Hoping to replace the function, set, and MySQL nodes at the end of other workflows with something similar to this using Execute Workflow:

For reference, this monitoring data is then used in another workflow to create a MySQL table that alerts us if a workflow hasn’t been executing or if the number of items has changed by a significant amount:

Information on your n8n setup

  • n8n version: 0.161.1
  • Database you’re using (default: SQLite): default
  • Running n8n with the execution process [own(default), main]: default
  • Running n8n via [Docker, npm, n8n.cloud, desktop app]: Docker
2

Hey @kcawley, I like that idea a lot! Unfortunately, I can’t think of a way to retrieve this data inside your sub-workflow (other than manually passing it on from the parent, of course).

So I shall convert this question into a feature request, allowing you and other users to vote on having such data available.

3

Appreciate the quick response, @MutedJam ! We’ll stick with our current solution for now, but hope to see this improvement in a future release.

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