1) Design route strategy before incidents happen
Reliability work starts with explicit routing intent. Identify primary providers per workload and define fallback order based on latency, quality, and cost constraints. Sentinel Primo executes those policies in-line so every request follows a known reliability path instead of improvised runtime behavior.
Avoid overloading fallback with broad defaults. Different workloads need different recovery behavior: user-facing chat may prioritize latency while back-office summarization can tolerate retries. Route policy should encode these distinctions clearly.
- Assign route profiles per workload class.
- Define failure conditions that trigger fallback.
- Document the maximum retry budget per request type.
2) Bound retries and timeouts to protect users
Retries improve resiliency only when bounded. Unbounded retry behavior can increase latency and cost without improving success rates. Sentinel Primo allows teams to set retry counts, timeout envelopes, and route transition logic as enforceable policy, producing predictable degradation patterns under stress.
User experience should guide these limits. For interactive workloads, a fast fallback is often better than waiting on repeated attempts. For non-interactive tasks, longer retries may be acceptable. Defining these thresholds early gives incident responders a stable baseline.
- Cap retry attempts and include jitter where appropriate.
- Set workload-specific timeout envelopes.
- Record which retries were attempted and why.
3) Use telemetry to close the loop
Reliability posture should be measured continuously. Sentinel Primo emits route and completion metadata that can be used to track failover frequency, latency drift, and policy hit rates. These signals make it easier to detect instability before it becomes a customer issue.
After each incident, compare expected behavior against actual route outcomes. If fallback triggered too late, tighten thresholds. If costs rose unexpectedly during failover, add route-level budget controls. This loop turns incidents into durable reliability improvements.
- Track primary success rate and fallback frequency by provider.
- Correlate latency spikes with route decision logs.
- Review route policy monthly as provider conditions evolve.
Next steps
Request a demo to design fallback and retry policy for your workload mix.