Glossary
Retry Policy
Rules governing when and how an AI agent automatically reattempts failed operations, including retry timing, maximum attempts, and backoff strategies.
What is Retry Policy?
Retry policies enable agents to gracefully handle transient failures without immediate escalation or abandonment. Well-designed policies distinguish between retryable errors like temporary network issues and permanent failures like authentication errors that won't succeed on retry. Exponential backoff and jitter prevent retry storms that could overwhelm recovering services.
Effective retry policies balance persistence with efficiency, avoiding wasted resources on doomed retries while ensuring transient issues don't cause unnecessary failures. They consider factors like operation criticality, user experience impacts, downstream service constraints, and total operation timeout limits.
Example
An agent calling an external API receives a 503 Service Unavailable error. Its retry policy waits 1 second, retries, receives another 503, waits 2 seconds, retries again successfully. Without the retry policy, the operation would have failed immediately despite the service being available moments later.
How Signet addresses this
Signet evaluates retry policy sophistication as part of the Reliability dimension. Agents with intelligent retry strategies demonstrate operational resilience, maintaining higher success rates under adverse conditions and earning stronger Reliability scores than agents that fail on first error.
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