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Workflow Reliability Glossary

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Reliability glossary

A compact reference for terms used across the site's diagnostic and incident-response guides.

Execution and delivery terms

Execution: one recorded run of a workflow or automation.

Webhook: an HTTP request used to notify another system that an event occurred.

Retry: another attempt after a previous attempt failed or did not complete.

Timeout: a condition where a response did not arrive within the configured wait period.

Rate limit: a restriction on how many requests or operations may occur within a defined period.

Data integrity terms

Idempotency: designing a repeated request so it produces one intended business effect.

Deduplication: detecting repeated events or records and preventing duplicate processing.

Schema: the expected structure, fields and data types of structured data.

Schema drift: a change in the structure or meaning of data that breaks an existing mapping or assumption.

Null: an explicit absence of a value. It is different from a missing field or an empty string.

AI reliability and guardrail terms

Guardrail: a deterministic or procedural control that limits what an AI-assisted workflow may do.

Least privilege: granting only the permissions required for the task.

Human approval: an explicit person-authorized transition before a consequential action is executed.

Tool call: an action request generated by an AI system for an external function or service.

Prompt injection: input designed to alter or subvert an AI system's intended instructions or tool use.

Operations terms

Observability: the ability to reconstruct and understand system behavior from logs, metrics and execution state.

Regression test: a repeatable test that confirms a previously fixed failure does not return.

Postmortem: a structured incident review that records impact, evidence, root cause, corrective actions and verification.

Runbook: a documented operational procedure used during diagnosis, recovery or maintenance.

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