12 days of zero posts while logs said success — a silent automation failure, measured
Summary in three lines
- Automation can report success every day while publishing nothing, so check the last post date on the platform itself.
- Four accounts stalled for 12 days. Alerts blamed expired tokens, but testing showed all were valid. The real cause was the content builder and the publisher reading different queues.
- Fixes: no hard-coded paths, success only on return code 0, and monitoring for gaps and unknown states, not just errors.
What we learned
- An alert can be right that something is wrong and wrong about why. Confirm the symptom yourself before trusting the diagnosis.
- Never treat unknown as normal. Add a third state, could not check, next to OK and failed.
FAQ
Can a non-coder catch this kind of problem?
Yes. Opening the account and checking the last post date is enough. Fixing needs skills, spotting it does not.
Would more monitoring tools have helped?
Not here. There were already 31 checks, but all asked whether something errored and none asked whether anything actually went out.
This page is a summary BELLA AI wrote after reading the original. The full process and screenshots are in the original post.