Task Manager — Task Registration & Scheduling

Background tasks run inside the Kibana process and share its capacity pool. A misconfigured task can block shutdown, exhaust the pool, retry forever, or duplicate itself on every restart. The defaults are not always the right choice — verify each field below explicitly.

Overview

A task type is registered in the setup lifecycle of a plugin via taskManager.registerTaskDefinitions({ [type]: definition }). The definition declares static metadata (timeout, cost, priority, maxAttempts, schemas) and a createTaskRunner factory that returns { run, cancel? } per task instance.

Tasks are scheduled separately, usually on plugin start, via taskManager.ensureScheduled (recurring/idempotent) or taskManager.schedule / bulkSchedule (one-shot).

Source of truth:

• Definition shape: x-pack/platform/plugins/shared/task_manager/server/task.ts (TaskDefinition, RunContext, TaskCost, TaskPriority, InstanceTaskCost, DEFAULT_TIMEOUT = '5m')
• Error helpers: x-pack/platform/plugins/shared/task_manager/server/task_running/errors.ts
• Plugin entry point exports: @kbn/task-manager-plugin/server

Registration anatomy