Queue health

Queue.health() reports backlog depth, lease state, external waits, admission pressure, statistics, and retention progress with a healthy, degraded, or critical verdict.

const health = await queue.health();
if (health.status.level !== "healthy") console.warn(health.status.reasons);

PostgreSQL reads correctness-sensitive values in one statement, so every exact count describes the same instant at capturedAt. Lagging database statistics live under observations; when an observation and an exact count disagree, the exact count wins.

Bounded work, stable reasons

Live-state counts are exact. Unbounded terminal history and statistics buckets stop at explicit caps and mark the result as a lower bound, so health polling does not become more expensive as a database ages.

Critical reasons mean work is stopping now, such as an expired lease, overdue external wait, or stalled promotion. Degraded reasons mean the queue still runs while maintenance or admission falls behind. The reason codes are stable, so alerts can branch on them without parsing prose.

PostgreSQL owns the budgets and returns the applied values under budgets. Application sync seeds defaults without replacing operator overrides, so TypeScript, Go, Python, the dashboard, and workhorse health --json all use the same evaluation.

Every client decodes the database response into its language's QueueHealth type, preserving the same reason codes and the capped lower-bound marker for operator tooling.

Next

• Operations — act on unhealthy queue state
• Maintenance — understand the work health budgets watch
• Dashboard — inspect reasons with operator context

Exact health fields, scan caps, budgets, and reason codes: architecture reference.