Telemetry
For teams running queues, cron jobs, imports, and async workers

Background Job Monitoring

Use structured events to see job throughput, retries, failures, dead letters, queue health, and p95 duration.

Reviewed by the Telemetry product team on . Event contract, recommended analysis, and privacy boundaries. Review standards and ownership

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Why this works
  • Find repeated failures by job name, queue, worker, and customer account.
  • Catch stalled jobs and retry loops before they become customer issues.
  • Give support and engineering one queryable history of async work.
Use-case evidence path

Background Job Monitoring: from implementation to decision

A complete background job monitoring measurement loop connects one owned workflow, a bounded event contract, a controlled fixture, and a question someone can act on.

  1. 1

    Set the boundary

    Log job_started, job_completed, job_failed, and job_retried.

  2. 2

    Capture the outcome

    Begin with job_started, job_completed, job_failed and document the grain of each event.

  3. 3

    Prove the rows

    Add alerts for stalled jobs, repeated failures, and dead-letter creation.

  4. 4

    Make the decision

    Which jobs fail or retry most often?

Use case versus template

This page explains what to measure and why

Use the use-case guide to choose outcomes, event boundaries, and analysis questions. Open the matching template when you are ready for a shorter copy-paste implementation brief.

Open Background Job Failure Monitor

Agent prompt

Paste this into your coding agent

Replace YOUR_API_KEY after signup, then ask the agent to run the product flow and verify the first events.

agent prompt

Background Job Monitoring setup prompt

text
Instrument background jobs and async workers with Telemetry.

Use /skill.md and this Telemetry API key: YOUR_API_KEY

Please log job_started, job_completed, and job_failed events with job_name, queue_name, attempt, status, duration_ms, scheduled_at, started_at, completed_at, item_count, retry_count, and error_type.

Create a dashboard showing throughput by job, failures by job, p95 duration, retry volume, oldest pending job, and dead-letter events. Add alerts for stalled jobs and repeated failures.

Setup steps

  1. 1Log job_started, job_completed, job_failed, and job_retried.
  2. 2Include queue, job name, attempt, duration, item count, and error type.
  3. 3Build a dashboard for throughput, failures, retries, and p95 duration.
  4. 4Add alerts for stalled jobs, repeated failures, and dead-letter creation.

Events to capture

job_startedjob_completedjob_failedjob_retrieddead_letter_createdcron_tick_failed

Questions unlocked

  • Which jobs fail or retry most often?
  • Which queues are falling behind?
  • Which customers are affected by failed background work?

Event schema starting points

Event contracts for this workflow

Review the row grain, emit boundary, required types, privacy classes, example payload, and validation checklist before adapting a query or snippet to production.

Async reliability11 fields

background_job_completed

One terminal outcome per logical job.

Inspect contract

Related product capability

Continue this workflow in Alerts

Promote the reviewed reliability query into an owned threshold and response workflow.

Explore AlertsReview customer evidence

Related SQL recipes

Answer the next question with SQL

Run the query against the structured fields from this workflow, inspect the example result, and turn a useful answer into a dashboard or alert.

Browse all recipes
Background jobsBeginner

Measure Background Job Retry and Failure Rate

Which background jobs consume the most retries or still fail?

Open recipe
Background jobsIntermediate

Find Stalled Background Jobs With SQL

Which jobs started but never produced a terminal event?

Open recipe
Background jobsBeginner

Measure Queue Wait Time by Job

Which jobs wait longest before a worker starts them?

Open recipe
Background jobsIntermediate

Measure Dead-Letter Queue Growth

Which queues are adding dead-letter jobs faster than they are resolving them?

Open recipe
Background jobsIntermediate

Detect Missed Cron Schedules

Which scheduled jobs ran later than their documented interval?

Open recipe
Background jobsIntermediate

Detect Background-Job Retry Storms

Which job types are spending the most work on retries right now?

Open recipe
Complete collectionsBackground jobs SQL

Customer evidence

Related workflows described by customers

“Telemetry is my go-to for dumping logs and tracking events. It's straightforward, the SQL workbench is fast, and I don't have to worry about the schema upfront. Running SQL over a REST API lets me fetch data and dump reports straight to Slack. It's the essentials of what Sentry did for me.”

Prem Viswanathan, SwiftCX

Review the documented context

Next step

Create the API key your agent will use

The free plan is enough to run the prompt, send test events, and review the first dashboard.

Prompt packStart with sample data

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