Sleep

general.sleep pauses the flow for a fixed number of seconds, then lets execution continue. Use it for settling time between actions — waiting for a routing protocol to converge, a service to finish restarting, or a change to propagate — when there is nothing to poll and a plain delay is enough.

Using It

Duration sets the wait: the step pauses exactly that many seconds (the editor pre-fills 30; minimum 1) and then succeeds. The wait is a plain timer — nothing is checked or polled while it runs — and the step targets no devices, so there is no target picker.

Message is an optional note explaining why the flow is waiting, e.g. "Waiting for BGP to converge". It is logged when the sleep starts and becomes the step's summary when it completes - a blank message means a blank summary. Only a definition that omits the field entirely gets the generated "Sleeping for N seconds" text. Like other config fields it is resolved by the step template engine first, so it can reference flow inputs or earlier steps, e.g. Settling after {{ steps.NODE_ID.summary }}.

Output

The step adds no custom chainable output keys; its summary — the message, or the generated text — is what later steps can reference as steps.NODE_ID.summary. Metrics record sleep_seconds, the configured duration. One step_result evidence record named sleep_completed captures the duration and the message.

When It Fails

The step fails before sleeping when the duration is not a positive number (error: "Invalid sleep duration: must be > 0"); the editor form already enforces the minimum of 1, so this normally only occurs in hand-edited flow definitions - which also fail when they omit the field, since nothing supplies the editor's 30-second pre-fill there. Once the wait starts, the handler imposes no timeout or interruption of its own — it sleeps the full duration and succeeds.