Building a Resilient System: Handling Failures and Retries in trigger.do

In a perfect world, every API call returns a 200 OK, every network is stable, and every service is always online. In the real world, distributed systems face a constant barrage of transient issues: network blips, temporary service outages, and API rate limits. For event-driven applications, a single dropped webhook or a failed API call can break a critical workflow, leading to lost data and a poor user experience.

This is why resilience isn't an afterthought—it's a core requirement. When you build with trigger.do, you're not just automating tasks; you're building a reliable system designed to withstand real-world chaos. Let's dive into how trigger.do handles failures and retries to ensure your workflows run successfully, every time.

Why Failure Handling is Crucial for Workflow Automation

Event-driven automation is powerful. A single event—a webhook from Stripe, a new user signing up, a scheduled cron job—can kick off a complex series of actions. But this power comes with responsibility. What happens when a step in that chain fails?

• A failed user.created webhook: A new user signs up, but the API call to your email marketing service times out. The welcome email is never sent, and the user's first impression is a confusing silence.
• A temporary database outage: Your nightly scheduled task to generate and email a critical sales report fails because the database was down for a 2-minute maintenance window. Your team starts their day without vital information.
• An API rate limit: Your agentic workflow, designed to enrich customer data, gets rate-limited by a third-party service. The entire process halts, leaving customer records incomplete.

In these scenarios, the trigger event is lost forever unless you've built complex, stateful retry logic yourself. This is where trigger.do shines, providing enterprise-grade resilience out of the box.

The trigger.do Resilience Playbook

Our platform is engineered from the ground up to ensure that your event-driven workflows are not just triggered, but reliably completed. Here’s how we do it.

1. Automatic Retries with Exponential Backoff

When a workflow run fails due to a temporary issue (like a 503 Service Unavailable error from a downstream API), trigger.do doesn't just give up. It automatically retries the action.

More importantly, it does so intelligently using exponential backoff.

• 1st Failure: Retry after a short delay (e.g., 2 seconds).
• 2nd Failure: Wait a bit longer (e.g., 4 seconds).
• 3rd Failure: Wait even longer (e.g., 8 seconds).

This strategy is crucial. It gives the struggling downstream service time to recover without being overwhelmed by constant, rapid-fire retries (a problem known as the "thundering herd"). For you, this means many transient errors resolve themselves with zero manual intervention.

2. Configurable Retry Policies

While our default settings are great for most use cases, we know that one size doesn't fit all. trigger.do gives you the power to fine-tune the retry behavior for each specific workflow trigger.

You can configure parameters like:

• The maximum number of retries.
• The backoff rate and randomization factor.
• Specific error codes that should (or should not) trigger a retry.

This allows you to create aggressive retry policies for critical financial transactions and more conservative ones for low-priority notifications.

3. Deep Observability and Detailed Logging

When a failure is permanent and retries are exhausted, you need to know exactly what went wrong. trigger.do provides comprehensive logging for every step of your workflow.

As seen in our simple SDK, the context object is your gateway to powerful, structured logging.

import { trigger } from "@do/sdk";

const githubIssueTrigger = trigger.on("github.issue.opened", {
  name: "Notify on New GitHub Issue",
  run: async (event, context) => {
    // This log appears with all workflow context attached
    context.logger.info("Starting notification workflow.", { 
      issueId: event.payload.issue.id 
    });

    try {
      const result = await send.toSlackChannel({
        channel: "#dev-alerts",
        message: `New Issue: ${event.payload.issue.title}`,
      });
      return { success: true, result };
    } catch (error) {
      // Log the specific error before letting the platform handle the retry
      context.logger.error("Failed to send Slack notification.", { error });
      throw error; // Re-throw the error to trigger the retry mechanism
    }
  },
});

Our platform automatically captures:

• The initial trigger event and its payload.
• Each execution attempt.
• The exact error message and stack trace for each failure.
• The outcome of each retry.

This detailed audit trail, available in our dashboard, makes debugging complex failures fast and efficient.

4. Real-Time Monitoring and Alerting

Don't wait for your users to tell you something is broken. The trigger.do dashboard provides a real-time view of your workflow health. You can monitor success rates, execution times, and error patterns at a glance.

For critical workflows, you can configure alerts to be sent to your team via email or webhook when a workflow fails permanently, anabling your on-call engineers to investigate and resolve issues proactively.

From Theory to Practice: A Resilient Workflow

Imagine a Stripe webhook fires for a invoice.paid event. Your workflow needs to:

1. Grant the user access to a premium feature in your database.
2. Send a "Thank You" email.

The Failure: When the trigger fires, your email provider's API is temporarily unavailable.

The trigger.do Path to Success:

1. Invocation: trigger.do receives the invoice.paid webhook and starts the workflow.
2. Success: The database update succeeds.
3. Failure: The call to the email API fails with a 502 Bad Gateway error. The platform logs the error.
4. Automatic Retry: Instead of failing the entire workflow, the retry mechanism kicks in. It waits for a few seconds.
5. Re-run: The platform attempts the failed step again. This time, the email API is back online. The call succeeds.
6. Completion: The workflow is marked as successful.

The result? The system healed itself. The customer got their email, the feature was granted, and your team didn't have to lift a finger. You've successfully built a robust, event-driven process that can handle the unpredictability of the web.

Build Automations You Can Trust

At trigger.do, we believe workflow automation is the backbone of modern applications. That backbone needs to be strong, flexible, and above all, resilient. By handling failures, retries, and logging automatically, we free you to focus on what matters: building powerful, agentic workflows that just work.

Ready to stop worrying about transient failures? Explore the trigger.do platform today and build more resilient systems.