What operational best practices apply to retries, timeouts, and pauses in durable agent workflows?

Set retry policies with exponential backoff and a maximum retry count to avoid infinite loops. Define timeouts for every activity to prevent resource leaks. For human-in-the-loop pauses, always set a timeout to handle missing signals gracefully. Monitor workflow state with Dapr's observability tools. Log all retry attempts and compensation actions for audit. Test failure scenarios in staging to ensure idempotency and rollback correctness.