Agent Recovery

Agent Recovery

Agent recovery is the process of bringing an agent out of an error state and back into normal operation. An agent can end up in an error state for reasons ranging from a crashed process inside its container to a failed dependency or an unhandled exception during a task; recovery is the mechanism by which an operator, or an automated policy, restores that agent to a usable condition rather than treating the failure as final.

How it works

When an agent enters an error state, its container may have stopped unexpectedly, or a task may have failed in a way that leaves the agent unable to accept new work until the underlying problem is addressed. A recovery action attempts to restart the agent's container or process, reattach it to its persisted state, and return it to the running state so it can resume normal operation. Depending on the platform, recovery may be triggered manually by an operator after investigating the cause of the error, or retried automatically a limited number of times before requiring manual intervention.

Recovery vs resume

Recovery is often confused with a simple resume, but they address different situations. Resuming an agent reverses a pause, a state the agent entered intentionally and cleanly. Recovering an agent addresses an error state, a state the agent entered unintentionally, typically due to a failure. Recovery may involve additional steps beyond a plain resume, such as restarting a container that has genuinely crashed rather than one that was deliberately stopped.

Why it matters

Long-lived agents accumulate history, configuration, and context over time, which makes them expensive to simply discard and recreate whenever something goes wrong. A recovery path means an operator can address the cause of a failure, whether that is a code bug, a resource limit, or an upstream provider outage, without losing the agent's accumulated state. This is particularly relevant for self-hosted infrastructure, where the operator, rather than a managed vendor, is responsible for diagnosing and resolving failures.

Agent recovery in Agenhood

Agenhood includes a recover action alongside pause, resume, archive, and restore, letting an operator bring an agent out of an error state through the web console or the REST API once the underlying issue has been addressed.