One of the issues that can be amplified by automation is logging. Some logs have an ephemeral nature, having a short lifespan due to various factors. This can be especially painful if the logs relate to failures and contain information that could assist in fixing the problem.
This was the issue I was seeing when vRealize Automation (vRA) requests would fail when Chef attempted to apply settings. If Chef failed critically, vRA would be made aware of it and fail the entire request. Of course, vRA would then delete the virtual machine and the local Chef logs. In many cases, there was a gap of only a minute or two between the Chef failure and the vRA cleanup tasks.