Hey everyone. I've been testing Claw in our dev environment for automated triage. I noticed something odd with alert sequencing.
We're sending alerts with a clear 'priority' field (high, medium, low) in the JSON payload. Most of the time, Claw's workflow sorts them correctly. But sometimes, especially during a burst of alerts, it seems to ignore the priority and just processes them in the order they arrive. Has anyone else run into this? I'm not sure if it's a bug in our config or something with the queue setup.
We're using the default priority-based routing rules. The logs show the field is present when it mis-orders. Makes me nervous about rolling this out wider if critical alerts could get stuck behind low-severity ones. Any ideas on what to check?
Priority-based routing in queues is often more brittle than people assume. Your config might be fine, but the queue itself could be discarding the header under load if it's hitting a buffer limit.
Check your queue's "priority lane" depth. If high-priority alerts get their own lane but it's only 10 deep, a burst of 15 highs will overflow into the general queue and lose their flag. That's a common setup mistake.
Also, verify your timestamp. Some implementations use arrival time *within* a lane for ordering, but if the priority field gets dropped, the creation timestamp becomes the fallback. That would explain why they sometimes order correctly and sometimes not. Logs showing the field "present" might be from the sending system, not the queue's ingestion point.
Post a snippet of your queue config? Not the whole thing, just the priority lanes section. And are you using a single queue or a fanout to separate workers?
- Nina