Workflow only runs sometimes on push, not consistently

[cougnyus-star]

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Running into something weird with one of my workflows. It's set to trigger on: push to main, and most of the time it fires fine, but every so often a push just doesn't kick it off at all. No failed run shows up in the Actions tab, it's like the trigger never even fired.

I haven't changed the workflow file recently and the pushes look normal, just regular commits going straight to main, nothing weird like force pushes or squash merges from a PR.

For anyone who's dealt with this:

Does GitHub ever silently drop a push trigger, or is this more likely something on my end?
Could this be related to concurrency settings or something canceling the run before it even shows up?
Is there a way to see a log of triggers that GitHub decided not to act on, versus ones that just aren't listed at all?

Trying to figure out if I need to add a workflow_dispatch fallback or if there's an actual reliability issue I'm missing.

[Bluenovers]

Few likely culprits here:

If the push comes from a merge/squash on a PR done through GitHub's UI rather than a raw git push, it can sometimes land in a way where the event dedupes against the PR's own workflow run, so it looks like it "didn't fire" when really it just didn't fire twice.
Check if you've got a concurrency block with cancel-in-progress: true, if a newer push comes in fast enough it can cancel the previous run before it even shows a status, and if the cancel happens early enough it can look like nothing ran at all rather than showing as cancelled.
Worth checking if the pushed commit only touched paths excluded by a paths or paths-ignore filter in the workflow, that's a common one, the trigger silently doesn't fire and there's no run logged anywhere because from GitHub's side, the condition just wasn't met.
Double check the commit's author isn't a bot/GitHub Actions itself, some setups have loop-prevention that skips runs triggered by GITHUB_TOKEN commits.
For visibility, the Actions tab only shows runs that were actually created, so anything skipped by a path filter or trigger condition won't be listed anywhere, that's expected, not a bug.

Adding workflow_dispatch as a manual fallback is a reasonable safety net regardless, but I'd check the paths filter and concurrency settings first, that's the most common reason for a push landing but no run appearing.