How to track down trigger for site workflow?

Question

I have a few site workflows which get a bunch of items from a list, check their conditions, and if they meet the criteria then emails get sent about the items. At the end of the workflow it transitions to a Stage which pauses:

Pause for 1 days, 0 hours, 0 minutes

and then transitions to the first stage and tries to send more emails. Goal is to get this to run ever 24 hours which had been working

Now the workflow is running a lot more often. This morning it was running ever 20 minutes, than ran twice 3 minutes apart. In the Workflow History list I see myself in the User ID column but I am not manually starting this workflow through Site Settings -> Site Workflow -> click on the workflow to start

How can I find out why these are running so often?

Answer 1

I don't think this information is recorded anywhere, except possibly in the ULS logs. Workflows themselves do not seem to be concerned with their origins.

Experimentally, I turned on Verbose logging for the Workflow service and then triggered a workflow manually. I then tried to find it in the ULS log and came up with this entry, which does not include any information about the trigger. I was not able to find any other explicit mention of workflow triggers, but that does not mean they don't exist.

11/14/2018 11:33:57.57 w3wp.exe ([ServerName]:0x20AC)
0x10D0 SharePoint Foundation Monitoring
b4ly High Leaving Monitored Scope: (EnsureListItemsData) Execution Time=14.2946240374126; CPU Milliseconds=10; SQL Query Count=3; Parent=Request (GET:https://[HostName]/_layouts/15/wfstart.aspx?List=%7B3E1990D6-7CF8-4D77-8AEE-668B13DB3CE6%7D&ID=48&TemplateID=828d826f-699a-4fd4-a543-21946b5bf036&AssociationName=Make%20Custom%20Picture) f553a29e-8e07-c0f9-323e-1022761b0c5b

I looked around and found this question has been asked before but unsatisfactorily.

The consensus seems to be that you can troubleshoot this kind of issue by defining conditions in your workflow to help you figure out what the trigger was. For example, if Created / CreatedBy are equal to Modified / Modified By then it is likely a new item, etc. But that may not help you after the fact.