Background jobs (automations)
Automations are the platform's internal background jobs: the schedulers and maintenance tasks that Console runs by itself, such as evaluating alert rules or polling inference servers. The Background jobs page shows each one with its live state, lets you run it immediately, and lets you pause and resume the ones that support it. The API and the SDK call them automations.
Automations are not something you create. There is a fixed set, each with a stable key. They are managed under Settings → Background jobs, and the page is for tenant administrators only.
The automations
| Key | Domain | Cadence | Pause | Run now |
|---|---|---|---|---|
alert-evaluation | Alerts | Scheduled | Yes | Yes |
inference-monitoring-poll | Monitoring | Scheduled | Yes | Yes |
browser-session-reaper | Browser | Scheduled | Yes | Yes |
browser-session-reconciliation | Browser | Manual maintenance | No | Yes |
- Alert Evaluation evaluates active alert rules across tenants and emits incidents or notifications. See Monitoring.
- Inference Poll Scheduler polls inference servers on their due intervals and refreshes their operational metrics.
- Browser Session Reaper closes idle or over-lifetime browser sessions in the local browser runtime. See Browser and flows.
- Browser Session Reconciliation reconciles browser sessions that were left active in the database after a runtime restart. It runs only when you start it, and it cannot be paused.
What you see on the screen
Summary tiles show how many automations exist and how many are Active, Paused and Degraded. Below them, a table lists every automation with its domain, state, cadence, key metrics, and last run. You can search by automation, domain or metric, and filter by domain and by state.
The possible states are Active, Running, Idle, Paused and Degraded.
Row actions are Run now, Pause or Resume (only where supported), and Details. Details opens a dialog with the description, the metrics, whether the job is guarded by a distributed lock, whether pause and manual trigger are supported, and the last error.
A banner on the page reminds you that these controls affect tenant-wide and process-level jobs, so restrict operational access carefully.
Common tasks
Run an automation now
- Open Settings → Background jobs.
- Choose Run now on the row. The run happens immediately and does not change the normal schedule. For scheduled automations the page refreshes with the new last-run time, duration and metrics.
Pause and resume a scheduler
- Choose Pause on the row of a scheduled automation. Its state becomes Paused and it stops running on schedule. You can still use Run now.
- Choose Resume to return it to its schedule.
Pausing is held in the memory of the Console process that handled your request; it is not stored in the database. Keep this in mind if you run more than one node (see Cluster).
Investigate a degraded automation
Open Details and read Last error and the metrics. Each automation reports different metrics:
alert-evaluation: fired count, lock provider, pending async tasks, processed tenants.inference-monitoring-poll: due servers, lock provider, processed tenants.browser-session-reaper: whether the browser runtime is connected, live sessions, and whether it is shutting down.browser-session-reconciliation: pending async tasks, sessions reconciled, tenants scanned.
Permissions
| Topic | Behaviour |
|---|---|
| Who can open it | Tenant administrators. The page is listed under Settings. |
| Permission | The automations service, which is an administrative service. API tokens need it in their service permissions to call the client API. |
| Scope | Automations are process-level and tenant-wide, not project-scoped. |
From code
The same operations are available through the client API with an API token: list, get, run, pause and resume. See the Automations API reference and the Automations SDK reference.