Unreliable Notifications

1

Alright - Lets talk notifications. I don’t know about others, but they have at times seemed unreliable to me (sometimes they trigger, sometimes they don’t, some methods of notifying go to spam, others dont, some take 1 minute, others take 10, etc.)

Anyways - Im finding an unreliable notification automation in one of my docs, and I just can’t figure out whats causing the problem. My current theory is: If a row is updated/changed by automation bot, these kinds of changes are not caught/read by other automation triggers as row changes and thus do not trigger those other automations.

Here is how its running right now:

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This notification has been working in the past, and has records of successful activity. I also have confirmation from those who have received the notifications that they are indeed working.

All of a sudden today they decided to not trigger correctly. The if condition read the result of step 1 as false and stopped the notification which led me to believe there was something wrong in my tables. I checked and double checked my tables (and did not change anything in-between them working correctly and then not working correctly) and the if condition should have read true? But it read false?
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I checked and double checked that row and Number is indeed = 2. Although in a deeper dive, I looked at the time that row (thisrow.number.modified()) was updated and by whom. It was updated after the original trigger time of 4:36 (see screenshot) and it was updated by Automation bot.

This leads me to believe that If a row is updated by Automation bot, other automations not pick that up as a row change in order to trigger a different automation? - is this true? Has anyone else run into this same issue? Because when my number column was changed at 5:03pm by automation bot, that change was not caught by my Notify VP automation in screenshot above. Any thoughts?

Thanks for the help!

(@Paul_Danyliuk any chance you can help confirm/deny this one as well? - Can’t figure this one out)

2

As far as I know, this is not correct. I didn’t have any problems with changes triggering an automation regardless of what the source of those changes was.

Automation doesn’t run on changes from formula columns. Also it won’t run if the change (ModifyRows or through an API) did not actually change the value, i.e. if it was already 2. There indeed may be race conditions, e.g. a modification is not guaranteed to be applied to the doc snapshot that gets picked by another automation run. But it’s usually the inclusion of the edit into the snapshot when row-triggered automations are run in the first place. So I believe that your “notify” automation should’ve been triggered by the edit at the moment that edit was applied onto the doc.

Cannot say any more without seeing the doc. Maybe the Support team would have more to say about this, or someone from the Engineering team.

3

Thank you @Paul_Danyliuk ! I really appreciate the input - Ill contact support to if there are any underlying issues Im not considering.