n8n Incident Triage & Cost Alerts with Slack, Gmail & OpenAI

Detect n8n incidents fast—triage errors, estimate OpenAI cost, and alert your team via Slack & Gmail

This n8n workflow monitors your n8n instance hourly and weekly, calculates execution health and estimated OpenAI spend, automatically triages incidents, posts critical alerts to Slack, logs history in Google Sheets, and sends an OpenAI-written weekly digest via Gmail.

What this workflow does

• Hourly “guard” monitoring: Runs every hour for a 1-hour guard window to check execution health.
• Weekly “digest” reporting: Runs every Monday at 9 AM for a 7-day digest window.
• Fetches workflow activity via the n8n API: Lists active workflows (excluding this monitor) and retrieves recent executions per workflow.
• Computes health metrics: Calculates per-workflow and instance totals such as run volume, failures, error rate, and p95 duration.
• Estimates OpenAI token cost (when available): Uses execution data that includes usage to estimate LLM spend.
• Guard-mode incident triage: Reads Guard_Log in Google Sheets to suppress repeats during cooldown, classifies incidents as warning/critical, extracts the failing node and error message from the latest failed execution, and for critical incidents deactivates the workflow via the n8n API unless it’s protected (e.g., tagged with no-auto-disable or critical).
• Digest-mode trend & clustering: Reads Metrics_History, compares recent patterns, samples failed executions to cluster similar error messages, and uses OpenAI to generate a structured weekly health summary.
• Communication: Sends an HTML email digest via Gmail and posts a Slack TL;DR.

Use cases

• Prevent runaway costs by detecting error spikes and estimating OpenAI spend per workflow.
• Reduce MTTR by auto-deactivating truly critical n8n workflows (with protections for important ones).
• Keep stakeholders updated with weekly, AI-generated n8n health and error trend summaries.

Technical details

• Integrations: n8n API, Slack, Gmail, Google Sheets, OpenAI
• Nodes used: if, set, code, gmail, slack, switch