58. Dead Letter / Escalation Pattern
Mini-Project: Dead Letter Queue: API Ingestion with Retry and Human Escalation
An API ingestion pipeline that retries failed tasks with exponential backoff, routes exhausted failures to a dead letter queue, and triggers human escalation alerts when the DLQ reaches a threshold.
Description
Prevents failed or unprocessable agent tasks from being silently lost. Ensures every task either succeeds, is retried, or is escalated to a human operator.
Failed tasks are placed in a dead letter queue (DLQ). A monitoring process reviews the DLQ, attempts retries with different strategies, and if all retries fail, escalates to a human operator with full context.
Architecture Diagram
flowchart TD
A[Agent Task] --> B{Success?}
B -->|Yes| C[Task Complete]
B -->|No| D[Retry with Backoff]
D --> E{Retry Success?}
E -->|Yes| C
E -->|No| F[Dead Letter Queue]
F --> G[Human Escalation]
style F fill:#F44336,color:#fff
style G fill:#FF9800,color:#fff
style C fill:#4CAF50,color:#fff