Frankly, this should have been implemented by now. I shouldn’t have to manually keep track of stats run per automation.
Why is this important?
Well, once you hit your 50K runs/month limit, the first sane thing you’ll want to do is:
Figure out which Automation was responsible for contributing THE MOST to this months quota. Does Airtable provide any built-in way to manage this? No. So you’re left spending more dev cycles implementing some hokey third-party webhook system to capture EVERY Automation Run evaluation and writing the date of each evaluation out to something like a Google Sheet (because Google Sheets don’t have a 50K record limit).
Then, once your stats are in Google Sheet, you need to spend time building graphs split by Automation Name to see how many executions ran per minute/per day/per week to figure out likely culprits. Again, more time wasted.
Next, once you find the culprit Automations, you might want to search the Automation Run logs to around the time WHEN THE SPIKE HAPPENED. Does Airtable allow you to do this? Sure – you can pull up the run logs… AND THEN YOU HAVE TO MASSIVELY SCROLL through historical logs – there’s no way to say “take me to the run logs back on 2022-04-15 @ 12:25 UTC” exactly – no, you’re left manually scrolling and clicking the “more” button for ever… and ever… and ever… and… well, you get the point.
Oh, and while we’re on this topic, when Airtable generates an email saying that an Automation Run encountered an error – unless you click that email within about 1-2 minutes of receiving it – let’s say you open up the email like 1-2 days later, IT DOES NOT AUTO-SCROLL you to the location in the logs where the error took place … No! Instead, you’re left to have to manually scroll again through the logs to figure out where it was located.
TL;DR:
- Automation Run logs suck; there’s no way to scroll or search them by time, keyword (sorely needed)
- We need Automation Run stats, in the form of graphs showing executions by day – split by Automation Name. This helps users not exceed Automation Run quotas.
