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Grace period

The grace period is extra time added to a workflow's expected interval before lateness becomes an incident. A workflow that runs every fifteen minutes with a ten-minute grace is only flagged once twenty-five minutes have passed. It is set per workflow, because tolerances differ.

What grace period should you set?

Set it just above the normal jitter you already see. A workflow that reliably runs within a minute of schedule needs very little; one that queues behind long-running jobs needs more. Too short and you get paged for runs that were merely late; too long and a genuinely dead workflow stays silent for hours.

Related terms

  • Missed run

    A missed run is a scheduled workflow execution that never happened — detected by absence rather than by an error, because nothing failed.

  • Expected interval

    How often a workflow should run — parsed from its cron configuration, or learned from execution history when the cadence is regular enough to trust.