Alerting on Worker metrics

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Your Worker processes emit metrics that the Temporal Service has no view into: Workflow code failing on replay, Workers that have stopped polling, Task slots that never free up, Local Activities that run past the Workflow Task heartbeat window. Nobody catches those for you.

This page recommends a set of alerts that covers them. It applies to Workers connected to Temporal Cloud and to a self-hosted Temporal Service.

For metric definitions and tag sets, see the Temporal SDK metrics reference. For Worker sizing and tuning, see Worker performance and Worker deployment and performance.

Before you start

None of this works until your Workers are emitting metrics and something is scraping them:

• Temporal Cloud: Set up SDK metrics, then configure Prometheus and Grafana.
• Self-hosted: Monitor Temporal Platform metrics.

Resolve the metric names for your setup

The metric names in the tables above are the base names from the SDK metrics reference. The names you query depend on your SDK and metrics reporter:

• Every metric carries a temporal_ prefix.
• Counters pick up a _total suffix when scraped through Prometheus, so request_failure becomes temporal_request_failure_total.
• Histograms pick up _seconds_bucket on the bucket series, so you query temporal_workflow_task_schedule_to_start_latency_seconds_bucket.
• Gauges take no suffix at all. temporal_num_pollers, temporal_worker_task_slots_available, and temporal_sticky_cache_size are gauges. Add _total to any of them and you get back nothing, with no hint as to why.

Tag coverage varies too. status_code values are UPPER_SNAKE_CASE in every SDK, matching the gRPC status code names (NOT_FOUND, RESOURCE_EXHAUSTED), and Client options can turn the tag off entirely. Not every SDK emits every tag. sticky_cache_size, for example, carries namespace only in the TypeScript and Java SDKs, and task_queue only in TypeScript.

Confirm the exact names and tags in your own metrics endpoint before writing queries.

Start with these five

If you are setting up Worker alerts for the first time, start here. These five catch the failure modes that stop Workflow Executions outright, and they are the least likely to wake you up for nothing.

1. All pollers disconnected. Your Workers have stopped polling.
2. Non-determinism error. Workflow code no longer matches recorded history.
3. gRPC message too large. Executions are being terminated and losing work.
4. Workflow Task schedule-to-start latency elevated. Tasks are backing up.
5. RESOURCE_EXHAUSTED on user-facing operations. Starts, Signals, and Updates are being throttled.

Add the rest once these are tuned and quiet.

Choose your thresholds

Every threshold on this page is a starting point, not a service level objective. A high-throughput Task Queue needs different values than a bursty batch workload.

There are two knobs per alert:

• The threshold sets what counts as unhealthy. Pick it from your own observed p99 during a period you know was healthy, not from the value listed here.
• The for duration sets how long the condition has to hold before the alert fires. Short durations catch problems faster but fire on transient spikes. Long durations stay quiet but delay detection.

Some of these alerts fire on a binary condition: any occurrence of a gRPC status code, or a gauge hitting zero. There is no threshold to tune on those, so the for duration is the only thing standing between you and a page.

Tune the for duration to your deploys

Several of these conditions appear briefly whenever you deploy. A rolling restart drops pollers to zero on each pod as it cycles, produces NOT_FOUND on respond operations for Tasks that were in flight, and can produce short-lived non-determinism errors while two Worker versions overlap. A Temporal Service upgrade does the same for INTERNAL.

All of those clear on their own once the rollout finishes, so the fix is a for duration longer than a deploy takes, not a quieter threshold. Time your own rollout and set it from that.

Two conditions need a different fix, because no for duration makes them correct:

• An idle Task Queue legitimately reports zero Task completions and an empty sticky cache. Pair both alerts with a demand signal instead, as Task completions dropped to zero and Sticky cache holding zero entries under load describe.
• Autoscaling to zero legitimately reports no pollers and no free slots. Exclude scaled-down Workers from those alerts, or scope them to Task Queues you keep warm.

Recommended alert set

The condition column gives the tag filters that tell each alert apart. Group every alert by namespace plus the tags in its condition, so that when one fires you already know which Namespace, operation, or Task Queue it came from.

Request failures

These fire on gRPC responses coming back from the Temporal Service to your Worker or Client. For triage, see Request failures.

Failure mode	Metric	Condition	Threshold	for	Default severity
NOT_FOUND on respond operations	request_failure	status_code=NOT_FOUND, operation in RespondWorkflowTaskCompleted, RespondWorkflowTaskFailed, RespondActivityTaskCompleted, RespondActivityTaskFailed	Any occurrence	5m	Critical
NOT_FOUND on Activity heartbeat	request_failure	status_code=NOT_FOUND, operation=RecordActivityTaskHeartbeat	Any occurrence	5m	Warning
RESOURCE_EXHAUSTED on user-facing operations	request_failure	status_code=RESOURCE_EXHAUSTED, operation in StartWorkflowExecution, SignalWithStartWorkflowExecution, SignalWorkflowExecution, UpdateWorkflowExecution, ExecuteMultiOperation	Any occurrence	1m	Critical
RESOURCE_EXHAUSTED on respond operations	request_failure	status_code=RESOURCE_EXHAUSTED, operation in the four respond operations above	Any occurrence	5m	Critical
RESOURCE_EXHAUSTED on poll operations	long_request_failure	status_code=RESOURCE_EXHAUSTED, operation in PollWorkflowTaskQueue, PollActivityTaskQueue	Any occurrence	5m	Warning
UNIMPLEMENTED from the Temporal Service	request_failure	status_code=UNIMPLEMENTED, any operation	Any occurrence	2m	Critical
INTERNAL from the Temporal Service	request_failure	status_code=INTERNAL, any operation	Any occurrence	2m	Critical
Request latency high on user-facing operations	request_latency	operation in the five user-facing operations above	p99 above 2s	5m	Critical

Worker capacity

These fire when your Workers stop keeping up with the Task Queue. For triage, see Worker capacity.

Failure mode	Metric	Condition	Threshold	for	Default severity
Worker Task slots exhausted	worker_task_slots_available	worker_type in WorkflowWorker, ActivityWorker, LocalActivityWorker	Reaches 0	2m	Critical
All pollers disconnected	num_pollers	poller_type in workflow_task, workflow_sticky_task, activity_task	Reaches 0	5m	Critical
Task completions dropped to zero	request	operation in RespondWorkflowTaskCompleted, RespondActivityTaskCompleted	Rate reaches 0 while the Task Queue has demand	5m	Critical
Workflow Task schedule-to-start latency elevated	workflow_task_schedule_to_start_latency	task_queue	p99 above 5s	5m	Critical
Workflow Task schedule-to-start latency severe	workflow_task_schedule_to_start_latency	task_queue	p99 above 30m	5m	Critical
Activity schedule-to-start latency severe	activity_schedule_to_start_latency	task_queue	p99 above 30m	5m	Critical
Sticky cache holding zero entries under load	sticky_cache_size	Paired with a non-zero Workflow Task rate on the same Worker	Reaches 0	15m	Warning

info

worker_task_slots_available reports meaningful values only with fixed-size slot suppliers. It can't be used with resource-based slot suppliers. See Slot availability metrics. If your Workers use resource-based tuning, skip this one and let schedule-to-start latency tell you when capacity is short.

Execution failures

These fire when your Workflow or Activity code fails on the Worker. For triage, see Execution failures.

Failure mode	Metric	Condition	Threshold	for	Default severity
Non-determinism error	workflow_task_execution_failed	failure_reason=NonDeterminismError	Any occurrence	1m	Critical
gRPC message too large	workflow_task_execution_failed	failure_reason=GrpcMessageTooLarge	Any occurrence	1m	Critical
Workflow Task execution failures elevated	workflow_task_execution_failed	failure_reason=WorkflowError	Rate above 10/s	2m	Warning
Workflow Task execution latency high	workflow_task_execution_latency	task_queue, workflow_type	p99 above 10s	5m	Critical
Activity execution failures elevated	activity_execution_failed	activity_type	Rate above 10/s	2m	Warning
Unregistered Activity invocation (Go SDK only)	unregistered_activity_invocation	activity_type, task_queue, workflow_type	Any occurrence	1m	Critical
Local Activity latency exceeds the heartbeat timeout	local_activity_execution_latency	activity_type	p99 above 30m	5m	Critical

Route alerts by severity

The severity in each table is a suggested routing default, not a property of the metric.

• Page on Critical. These mean Workflow Executions have stopped, or are still running but losing work or duplicating side effects.
• Send Warning to a channel someone reads during the day. These mean something is degrading but Executions are still moving.

Then adjust, because the defaults won't fit every deployment:

• Some Critical rows are early warnings, not confirmed stoppage. High Workflow Task execution latency matters a lot on a latency-sensitive Namespace and barely at all on a batch workload where Tasks routinely run long. Downgrade the latency alerts if that describes you.
• Some Warning rows can still lose you data. A NOT_FOUND on Activity heartbeat means the attempt already timed out and will run again from the start. If that Activity isn't idempotent, treat it as Critical.

One last thing worth knowing before you wire up routing: these alerts are chained together. Task slots fill up, which drops pollers to zero, which drives schedule-to-start latency up, which drives Task completions to zero. Expect them to fire in clusters, and check the triage pages to find which one is the cause rather than responding to all four. When several fire together, the triage pages identify which is the root cause and which are symptoms.