Background Jobs

Know when your queues are the problem, not just your requests

Two distinct signals, how long a job actually took to run and how long it sat waiting in queue before starting, each correlated the same way a request-latency spike already is.

Execution duration and queue latency are two different signals

How long a job actually took to run once it started, and how long it sat waiting in queue before that, are tracked as two distinct signals, not one blended number: a queue backing up behind a slow downstream dependency looks completely different from a job that's simply slow to execute once it starts, and conflating the two would hide exactly the distinction that matters when something's actually wrong.

Queue-wait latency is color-coded against real, documented thresholds, so a glance at the panel already tells you whether a queue is merely elevated or genuinely backed up, not just a raw number with no context for what's normal.

The Performance page's Background Jobs panel, showing p95 queue-wait latency for the default and shipments queues

p95 queue-wait latency, per queue, not blended into one number.


Feeds the same rules Probable Cause already checks

A real background-job failure inside an incident's own window feeds directly into Probable Cause's background-job rule: a floor of 20% confidence just for a real failure existing, scaling up to full magnitude at 10 or more, since a failing job is often part of the spike itself, not a separate upstream cause with its own lead time to measure.


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