Our retry logic was collecting data and then deleting it

Description and use

Logging retry attempt counts revealed gradual degradation and near‑miss failures that were previously hidden in green logs.

Problem

Retry loops erased evidence of retries, making it impossible to detect gradual degradation or near‑miss failures in unattended runs.

Outcome

By persisting retry counts, the team gained visibility into performance degradation and near‑miss failures, allowing proactive maintenance before failures occurred.

Workflow

• 1. Modify retry loop to record each attempt count. 2. Append attempt count to log entry regardless of success. 3. Store both outcome and attempt count. 4. Update monitoring to analyze attempt counts for trend detection. 5. Adjust alerting to flag high retry rates rather than only failures.

Evidence

We built ours to solve a problem, not to report one, and for months it did exactly what we asked: it caught a failure, waited, tried again, and got through.

Source

The fix is not clever. Count the attempts, write the count next to the outcome, and keep the count even when the outcome is good.

Source