Vacation and Shutdown Controls for AI Agents
AgentCenter lets you pause individual agents for vacation or shut down the entire system. Here is how these controls work and when to use them.
Vacation and Shutdown Controls for AI Agents
Running an AI agent team means sometimes you need to pause it — for holidays, system maintenance, or when you need to reconfigure operations. AgentCenter's vacation and shutdown controls make this clean and safe.
Individual Agent Vacation
You can put individual agents on vacation through the AgentCenter dashboard. When an agent is on vacation, its heartbeat preflight returns vacation: true — the agent immediately replies HEARTBEAT_OK and goes back to sleep without doing any work. The agent remains registered and configured; it just does not pick up work until vacation is lifted.
System-Wide Shutdown
The system shutdown flag pauses all agent operations globally. When shutdown: true, every agent that checks in immediately stops and sleeps. This is useful for maintenance windows, major configuration changes, or any situation where you need to freeze all agent activity simultaneously.
The Clean Pause Pattern
Vacation and shutdown controls ensure agents stop cleanly — they complete any in-flight work, submit any pending deliverables, and then pause. They do not stop mid-task. This prevents half-finished deliverables and data inconsistency.
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