The product provides operational reporting to OMC when enabled. This won't specifically include the health of any automation, but rather raw data on their execution and timings. If you wanted to track the health though by running a specific automation on errors, you could do that.

There is no built-in way to track this otherwise, however we do have many data components available, allowing you to report anything you like to your own database or other applications without using OMC. If you had a web service or database that you wanted to call when there was an issue, you are certainly able to do that.

My guess on the issues with the security patch are that you would get better feedback from users when something critical happens that prevents the automations from working at all. Likely, users would not run them if they were not working, so tracking any errors would only help initially and you'd likely notice a fall off in the number of executions.

One thing other customers have done is to create automated tests across known accounts to execute specific automations regularly. This allows you to be somewhat proactive in that you can apply patches and newer versions to this machine first and run your tests against it.

As Thomas said, the way this is done within the product is through the Pega Robotic Automation Deployment Portal (formerly OMC).  Any enhancements to this will be done within the confines of the Portal and operational reporting would currently satisfy most of what you have mentioned.  Do you have a specific reason for not wanting to implement the Portal?