Hi All, Is there a mechanism to apply on a task so that we would know if a task (or every task if that matters) within a flow is stuck in a specific state for a prolonged amount of time?

Hey @Mehdi Nazari, not exactly but you could use a

timeout

on the task level. If using Prefect Cloud, you can use an automation to change the state after a certain amount of time (mark as failed or send a notification)

Thank @Kevin Kho, I have explored automations, but didn’t notice any config related to time! Can you be more specific with your recommended solution please?

It would be like this. This is not on an individual task but you can set the Automation to trigger a notification if a Flow is in a given state of a certain amount of time

I see, Flow SLA management are Standard and Enterprise features. We’re still evaluating the free, 10,000 run/month plan.

Ah yeah. Then I guess you can try

task(timeout=…)

and then use a state handler, but timeouts don’t work all the time.

I’ve got another question @Kevin Kho, do you have examples where I can see how to configure a flow with a

While True:

condition in it? What are best practices?

So I think infinite loops or listeners like this are not best practice with Prefect because the recommendation is to used event-based triggers to create Flows but if you want to do this, I don’t think there is a best practice other than using it in your task. You can do it

Got it,

While True

in my case, is not particularly listening for an event to get triggered! This is our mechanism to go over millions of records in a storage (db) and process information. Would you be interested to take a look?

I think I know what you are saying. Yeah in this case, I think

while True:

in the task should work.

Great, Thank you. I’ll let you know how it works after my tests 🙂