The task log is the audit trail for the platform's background-task engine. Every scheduled or queued task that runs leaves a row here recording when it started, how long it took, and what happened.
What Each Row Tells You
- Started — timestamp.
- Task name — e.g. nightly_invoice_sync.
- Duration — how long it took.
- Status — success, failure, timeout, cancelled, retry-queued.
- Records processed — volume metric the task reports.
- Triggered by — cron schedule, manual invocation, event hook.
- Output — stdout/stderr captured (expand to view).
Useful Queries
- All failures in the last 24h — “why didn't the dashboard refresh overnight?”.
- All runs of send_renewal_emails last week — “did the campaign run on schedule every day?”.
- Long-running outliers — “which task took 30 minutes when it normally takes 30 seconds?”.
Worked Examples
- Missed renewal: Customer complains their subscription wasn't renewed. Filter log for process_subscription_renewals, see it failed at 03:00 with a Stripe rate-limit error. Replay the failed task.
- Performance regression: Sort by duration descending. The nightly_aggregation task ran in 90 seconds last week, 8 minutes today. Investigate the SQL plan changes.
- Volume audit: Sum records-processed across all tasks for the month — confirms ingestion volume for capacity planning.