How to tell when a Zap stops running

Everything Zapier reports to you hangs off a task. Task history, error emails, the counters on your dashboard: all of them describe work that happened. The question “has this Zap done anything today?” is answerable, but only by asking it, and nothing asks it on your behalf.

Zaps stop firing for reasons that generate no task at all:

• The Zap is off. Someone turned it off to test something, or it was turned off for you after repeated failures, and it was never turned back on.
• A polling trigger stops seeing new items because a filter, a permission or a renamed field means it never matches again. Zapier is polling successfully and finding nothing, which is not an error.
• An instant trigger's upstream service stops sending. Nothing arrives, so nothing runs.
• You are out of tasks for the billing period, so held tasks queue up rather than executing.

In all four the Zap looks fine in the editor. The distinction that matters is between ran and failed and did not run, and only the first is instrumented.

Zap error emails tell you about tasks that errored. Genuinely useful, and entirely silent for a Zap that has stopped producing tasks.

Task history answers the question accurately whenever you go and look. The detection time is therefore your own checking habit, which for the Zaps you think about often is fine and for the rest is the whole problem.

A second Zap watching the first is subject to the same account, the same task limits and the same ways of being switched off. If both are off, both are silent.

What none of these provide is an expectation held somewhere Zapier cannot switch off: something that believes this Zap reports every hour, and says so when an hour passes without a report.

Have the Zap call a URL as its final action. Each call resets a timer that lives outside Zapier. If the timer expires, no call arrived, and you get an email. The reason the Zap went quiet does not matter, which is the point: off, unmatched, out of tasks or upstream silence all look identical from outside, and all of them are things you want to know.

Add a Webhooks by Zapier action as the last step of the Zap, choose the GET action, and set the URL to the ping URL for that monitor:

Each monitor has an expected interval and a grace period; the deadline is the last ping plus both. Grace defaults to twice the interval, because a Zap that polls a few minutes late is normal, and an alert on normal behaviour is an alert you will learn to ignore.

After the deadline you get one email for that outage, not one per check. The checker runs every minute and records the alert the first time, so the rest stay quiet. When pings resume you get one all-clear, and only then can the monitor alert again: two emails per outage, one at each end.

For a Zap you expect once a day at a particular time, the deadline is wall-clock in your account's timezone, so it keeps meaning the same hour to you through daylight-saving changes.