When your automation says success but isn't working
My Instagram comment-to-DM funnel (comment a keyword, get a DM with a button, tap it, get the guide) logged green runs for about two weeks while it was broken. Here's how it failed and the checklist I use now.
The four ways it broke quietly
Wrong signing secret: real comments were rejected as fakes.
Missing permission: the API returned no comments, and no error. It leaves the field out instead of failing.
A typo in the message code: it failed every time there was real work, and passed every empty check.
Private Drive links: the DM went out, and the link asked for access.
Why nobody noticed
"Success" means the run finished, not that it worked. The comment checker ran 60 times in a row, green, and saw zero comments.
The checklist
Check the output, not the status. Count what it did: how many comments it saw, how many messages went out, whether a new row landed in the log.
Alarm on silence. Add at least one alert for something missing, not just something failing. Mine: if posts report comments but the check returns none, it stops with an error. If three people get the DM in a week and nobody taps, I get an alert.
Test it like a real person. Use a second account, on a real post, all the way to the end. My test caught one more bug: the line breaks in the first message showed up as \n.
Check the link opens in a private window, not signed in as you.
Re-test after any change. Most of my breaks came from a change somewhere else.