Recovery

Recovery is the ability to stop, contain, reverse, retry, compensate for, or safely continue after failure or interruption.

Plan for this page

Understand one concept in plain language and connect it to nearby ideas.

You will leave with: Recovery design identifies possible failures, known safe states, rollback or compensation methods, responsible people, preserved evidence, and criteria for resuming. Some physical, public, or disclosure actions cannot be fully reversed.
Time: 3–8 min
Before you begin: No prerequisite. Keep one real example in mind.
Do this now: Read the explanation, then compare the example with the common misunderstanding.

Prepared next stepPlan agent failure and recovery

RecoveryRecovery is the ability to stop, contain, reverse, retry, compensate for, or safely continue after failure or interruption.

Guardrail
Observability
AI incident

Plain explanation

Recovery design identifies possible failures, known safe states, rollback or compensation methods, responsible people, preserved evidence, and criteria for resuming. Some physical, public, or disclosure actions cannot be fully reversed.

Example

If an ordering agent creates a duplicate purchase, the system halts further orders, flags the transaction, cancels where possible, notifies an owner, and preserves logs.

Why it matters

Failures are inevitable in complex systems, so prevention alone is insufficient. Recovery limits duration and consequence while supporting learning from incidents.

Common misunderstanding

Misconception: retrying the same action is always recovery. Correction: an unsafe or non-idempotent retry can duplicate harm and must be governed by state and consequence.

Related concepts

Follow relationships, not only the alphabet

GuardrailA guardrail is a preventive, detective, or corrective control intended to keep system behavior within defined boundaries.ObservabilityObservability is the capacity to understand a system’s relevant internal state and behavior from designed records, signals, and traces.AI incidentAn AI incident is an event where an AI system causes, contributes to, or creates a credible risk of harm, failure, or rights impact.

Plan agent failure and recovery

Sources and scope

What supports this object

Artificial Intelligence Risk Management Framework (AI RMF 1.0)U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology

Supports incident response, monitoring and continuous risk management; exact recovery objectives depend on the system and consequence.

Open source

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