VercelEngineering PostOfficial Source

Measure time between steps in Vercel Workflows

Vercel’s workflow trace viewer can measure gaps between steps, helping distinguish slow task execution from delayed starts and queue waits in agent workflows.

Vercel · Aug 5, 2026

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Source Summary

The Vercel Workflows trace viewer can now measure time between any two steps. Select one step, hold **Option on macOS or Alt on Windows and Linux**, and hover another to draw the measurement.

Practical Implication

Use the gaps to investigate runs whose total duration exceeds the visible work. For sequential steps, the viewer measures end-to-start delay; for overlapping or nested steps, it compares start times. With nothing selected, the modifier reveals gaps across the timeline.

Agent-Ready Context

The Vercel Workflows trace viewer can now measure time between any two steps. Select one step, hold **Option on macOS or Alt on Windows and Linux**, and hover another to draw the measurement.

Use the gaps to investigate runs whose total duration exceeds the visible work. For sequential steps, the viewer measures end-to-start delay; for overlapping or nested steps, it compares start times. With nothing selected, the modifier reveals gaps across the timeline.

The feature exposes timing relationships but does not identify their cause. A visible delay may indicate a queued or delayed start, but the material does not describe automatic diagnosis, alerts, or historical aggregation.

Connected Context · Feed7 Judgment

This adds a precise manual way to locate unexplained time inside a workflow trace, narrowing investigation from total duration to specific inter-step or overlapping-start gaps. It improves diagnosis but not attribution or remediation: teams still need other telemetry and operational logic to determine whether a measured delay came from queuing, execution, routing, or another cause.

Export AI Gateway traces with Vercel DrainsWorkflow gap measurements locate delay between steps, while exported Gateway traces can explain latency, routing, and retries inside an inference request that occupies part of that timeline.Agent Runs now available in the Vercel MCP and CLIAgent Runs exposes reasoning and tool-call traces to coding agents; the workflow viewer adds a complementary human inspection of timing relationships around such work.AI Gateway logs now have a dedicated pageGateway logs provide request-level latency and fallback evidence that can help interpret a workflow gap, while the new measurement feature alone cannot identify its cause.How Forward Deployed Engineering is done at Factory — Eno ReyesFactory’s workflow-design approach makes instrumentation a prerequisite for bounded autonomy; explicit inter-step timing supplies one additional measurement for finding where an instrumented path stalls.

Context Map

infracoding#observability

Uncertainty

The feature exposes timing relationships but does not identify their cause. A visible delay may indicate a queued or delayed start, but the material does not describe automatic diagnosis, alerts, or historical aggregation.