Failures and error handling

Temporal provides Durable Execution, which guarantees that your application runs to completion despite infrastructure issues, network problems, and Worker crashes. However, not all failures are handled automatically by the platform. Understanding the difference between platform-level and application-level failures is key to building reliable Temporal applications.

This section covers:

• Application failures: What application failures are, how Temporal represents them, and how they propagate through your code.
• Detecting Activity failures: How to use timeouts and Heartbeats to detect when Activities fail or become unresponsive.
• Detecting Workflow failures: How Workflow-level timeouts work and when they apply.
• Retry Policies: How to configure automatic retry behavior for Activities and Workflows.

For prescriptive guidance on building an error handling strategy, see Error handling strategy.