Get Notified of Workflow Errors

This post applies to SharePoint 2007, SharePoint 2010, and even SharePoint Online in Office 365.

This DOES apply to SharePoint 2010 workflows created in SharePoint Designer 2013 (on prem or O365).  This DOES NOT apply to SharePoint 2013 workflows. They store errors very differently, so there isn’t an equivalent solution.

There is a way in SharePoint to create alerts based on filtered views, which I have blogged about before.  In this post, I’ll show you how to create an alert so that you’ll be notified when errors occur in your workflows.

The first trick is to find the workflow history list.  It is hidden.  This is where all of the workflow information is automatically recorded as workflows run.  This list is under Lists, and is called “Workflow History”, so the URL will be:

http://YOURSITE/Lists/Workflow%20History/

Create a new view of the list, you can call it ERRORS, and set the filter settings:

Description contains failed OR Description contains error

(Note that these 2 filters have seemed to encompass all errors I’ve come across, but I’m not positive that there won’t be some other error that’s got different verbiage than this)

Save the new view.

Create a new alert for yourself on this workflow history list, and in the section Send alerts for these changes, pick the ERRORS view you created.  You can even set the alert title to something catchy like “Workflow errors”

Note, here’s another blog post I’ve written about the workflow history list:

SharePoint Workflow History Issue