Summary: Neon Control Plane system operations are discrete, trackable actions that the control plane records for every user-initiated or system-initiated change to a project. Use this page to view operation history via the Console, CLI, or API; poll operation status before issuing the next API call to prevent race conditions; and recover from 423 Locked responses using exponential backoff. Terminal statuses are finished and skipped for successful completion, and failed, error, and cancelled for unsuccessful completion.

An operation is an action performed by the Neon Control Plane on a Neon object or resource. Operations are typically initiated by user actions, such as creating a branch or deleting a database. Other operations may be initiated by the Neon Control Plane, such as suspending a compute after a period of inactivity or checking its availability. You can monitor operations to keep an eye on the overall health of your Neon project or to check the status of specific operations. When working with the Neon API, you can poll the status of operations to ensure that an API request is completed before issuing the next API request. For more information, see Poll operation status.

You can view system operations via the Neon Console, Neon CLI, or Neon API.

Neon Console

You can view system operations via the Monitoring page in the Neon Console.

Operation details include:

• Operation: The action performed by the operation.
• Branch: The branch on which the operation was performed.
• Compute: The compute on which the operation occurred.
• Operation status: The status of the operation.
• Duration: The duration of the operation.
• Date: The date and time the operation occurred.

Possible Status values are OK, Scheduling, In progress, and Error.

CLI

To view operation using the Neon CLI:

neon operations list --project-id <project_id>

See Neon CLI commands — operations.

API

To list operations with the Neon API:

curl 'https://console.neon.tech/api/v2/projects/autumn-disk-484331/operations' \
  -H 'Accept: application/json' \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $NEON_API_KEY"

See Get a list of operations.

This section describes how to work with operations using the Neon API. The following topics are covered:

• List operations: Describes how to list all operations for a Neon project.
• List operations with pagination: Describes how to list all operations for a Neon project and paginate the response.
• Get operation: Describes how to retrieve the details for a specific operation by the operation ID.
• Poll operation status: Describes how to poll an operation for its status, which may be necessary to avoid failed requests due to in-progress operations when using the Neon API programmatically.

Note: Operation names have underscores when view using the API; for example:

Lists operations for the specified project. This method supports response pagination. For more information, see List operations with pagination.

/projects/{project_id}/operations

cURL command:

curl 'https://console.neon.tech/api/v2/projects/autumn-disk-484331/operations' \
  -H 'Accept: application/json' \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $NEON_API_KEY"

{
  "operations": [
    {
      "id": "97c7a650-e4ff-43d7-8c58-4c67f5050167",
      "project_id": "autumn-disk-484331",
      "branch_id": "br-wispy-dew-591433",
      "endpoint_id": "ep-orange-art-714542",
      "action": "check_availability",
      "status": "finished",
      "failures_count": 0,
      "created_at": "2022-12-09T08:47:52Z",
      "updated_at": "2022-12-09T08:47:56Z"
    },
    {
      "id": "0f3daf10-2544-425c-86d3-9a9932ab25b9",
      "project_id": "autumn-disk-484331",
      "branch_id": "br-wispy-dew-591433",
      "endpoint_id": "ep-orange-art-714542",
      "action": "check_availability",
      "status": "finished",
      "failures_count": 0,
      "created_at": "2022-12-09T04:47:39Z",
      "updated_at": "2022-12-09T04:47:44Z"
    },
    {
      "id": "fb8484df-51b4-4a40-b0fc-97b73998892b",
      "project_id": "autumn-disk-484331",
      "branch_id": "br-wispy-dew-591433",
      "endpoint_id": "ep-orange-art-714542",
      "action": "check_availability",
      "status": "finished",
      "failures_count": 0,
      "created_at": "2022-12-09T02:47:05Z",
      "updated_at": "2022-12-09T02:47:09Z"
    }
  ],
  "pagination": {
    "cursor": "2022-12-07T00:45:05.262011Z"
  }
}

Pagination allows you to limit the number of operations displayed, as the number of operations for a project can be large. To paginate responses, issue an initial request with a limit value. For brevity, the limit is set to 1 in the following example.

cURL command:

curl 'https://console.neon.tech/api/v2/projects/autumn-disk-484331/operations?limit=1' \
  -H 'Accept: application/json' \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $NEON_API_KEY"

{
  "operations": [
    {
      "id": "97c7a650-e4ff-43d7-8c58-4c67f5050167",
      "project_id": "autumn-disk-484331",
      "branch_id": "br-wispy-dew-591433",
      "endpoint_id": "ep-orange-art-714542",
      "action": "check_availability",
      "status": "finished",
      "failures_count": 0,
      "created_at": "2022-12-09T08:47:52Z",
      "updated_at": "2022-12-09T08:47:56Z"
    }
  ],
  "pagination": {
    "cursor": "2022-12-09T08:47:52.20417Z"
  }
}

To list the next page of operations, add the cursor value returned in the response body of the previous request and a limit value for the next page.

curl 'https://console.neon.tech/api/v2/projects/autumn-disk-484331/operations?cursor=2022-12-09T08%3A47%3A52.20417Z&limit=1' \
  -H 'Accept: application/json' \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $NEON_API_KEY"

{
  "operations": [
    {
      "id": "0f3daf10-2544-425c-86d3-9a9932ab25b9",
      "project_id": "autumn-disk-484331",
      "branch_id": "br-wispy-dew-591433",
      "endpoint_id": "ep-orange-art-714542",
      "action": "check_availability",
      "status": "finished",
      "failures_count": 0,
      "created_at": "2022-12-09T04:47:39Z",
      "updated_at": "2022-12-09T04:47:44Z"
    }
  ],
  "pagination": {
    "cursor": "2022-12-09T04:47:39.797163Z"
  }
}

This method shows only the details for the specified operation ID.

/projects/{project_id}/operations/{operation_id}

cURL command:

curl 'https://console.neon.tech/api/v2/projects/autumn-disk-484331/operations/97c7a650-e4ff-43d7-8c58-4c67f5050167' \
  -H 'Accept: application/json' \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $NEON_API_KEY"

{
  "operation": {
    "id": "97c7a650-e4ff-43d7-8c58-4c67f5050167",
    "project_id": "autumn-disk-484331",
    "branch_id": "br-wispy-dew-591433",
    "endpoint_id": "ep-orange-art-714542",
    "action": "check_availability",
    "status": "finished",
    "failures_count": 0,
    "created_at": "2022-12-09T08:47:52Z",
    "updated_at": "2022-12-09T08:47:56Z"
  }
}

Some Neon API requests may take a few moments to complete. When using the Neon API programmatically, you can check the status of an operation before proceeding with the next API request. For example, you may want to check the operation status of a create branch request before issuing a create database request for that branch.

The response to a Neon API request includes information about the operations that were initiated. For example, a create branch request initiates create_branch and start_compute operations.

"operations": [
    {
      "id": "22acbb37-209b-4b90-a39c-8460090e1329",
      "project_id": "autumn-disk-484331",
      "branch_id": "br-dawn-scene-747675",
      "action": "create_branch",
      "status": "running",
      "failures_count": 0,
      "created_at": "2022-12-08T19:55:43Z",
      "updated_at": "2022-12-08T19:55:43Z"
    },
    {
      "id": "055b17e6-ffe3-47ab-b545-cfd7db6fd8b8",
      "project_id": "autumn-disk-484331",
      "branch_id": "br-dawn-scene-747675",
      "endpoint_id": "ep-small-bush-675287",
      "action": "start_compute",
      "status": "scheduling",
      "failures_count": 0,
      "created_at": "2022-12-08T19:55:43Z",
      "updated_at": "2022-12-08T19:55:43Z"
    }
  ]

You can use the Get operation details method to poll the status of an operation by the operation ID. You might do this at intervals of 5 seconds until the status of the operation changes to finished before issuing the next request. For example, this request polls the start_compute operation shown above:

curl 'https://console.neon.tech/api/v2/projects/autumn-disk-484331/operations/055b17e6-ffe3-47ab-b545-cfd7db6fd8b8' \
  -H 'Accept: application/json' \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $NEON_API_KEY"

{
  "operation": {
    "id": "055b17e6-ffe3-47ab-b545-cfd7db6fd8b8",
    "project_id": "autumn-disk-484331",
    "branch_id": "br-dawn-scene-747675",
    "endpoint_id": "ep-small-bush-675287",
    "action": "start_compute",
    "status": "finished",
    "failures_count": 0,
    "created_at": "2022-12-08T19:55:43Z",
    "updated_at": "2022-12-08T19:55:43Z"
  }
}

Possible operation status values include: scheduling, running, finished, failed, error, cancelling, cancelled, and skipped. The successful terminal statuses are finished and skipped; the unsuccessful terminal statuses are failed, error, and cancelled. The remaining statuses are nonterminal. A failed operation can include retry history in failures_count and retry_at.

Neon limits overlapping operations on a project. One API response can still list several operations (for example create_branch and start_compute) when they are part of the same request. If you try to start more work while the project is already busy with conflicting operations, the API returns 423 Locked.

This can happen when:

• Your own API requests overlap. For example, creating a branch before a previous branch creation has finished.
• A system-initiated operation is running, such as a platform maintenance task or a periodic availability check.

Following Poll operation status limits conflicts from your own overlapping requests. You can still get 423 if a system-initiated operation starts between your poll and your next call, so keep retry handling as a fallback.

If the API returns 423 Locked, retry the same request after a short wait, increasing the delay between attempts (exponential backoff), and stop after a maximum number of tries. The example below starts at 0.1 seconds and doubles the wait on each attempt, up to five attempts.

#!/usr/bin/env bash
# Retries a create-branch request when the response is 423 Locked.
# Set PROJECT_ID and NEON_API_KEY. Replace br-main-abc123 with a parent branch id from your project.

MAX_RETRIES=5
DELAY=0.1  # 100 msec

for ATTEMPT in $(seq 1 "$MAX_RETRIES"); do
  response=$(curl -s -w "\n%{http_code}" \
    "https://console.neon.tech/api/v2/projects/${PROJECT_ID}/branches" \
    -H 'Accept: application/json' \
    -H "Authorization: Bearer ${NEON_API_KEY}" \
    -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
    -d '{"endpoints":[{"type":"read_write"}],"branch":{"parent_id":"br-main-abc123"}}')

  http_code=$(echo "$response" | tail -n1)
  body=$(echo "$response" | sed '$d')

  if [ "$http_code" != "423" ]; then
    echo "$body"
    exit 0
  fi

  echo "Project locked, retrying in ${DELAY}s (attempt ${ATTEMPT}/${MAX_RETRIES})..." >&2
  sleep "$DELAY"
  DELAY=$(awk -v d="$DELAY" 'BEGIN { printf "%.10g", d * 2 }')
done

echo "Max retries reached" >&2
exit 1

Replace br-main-abc123 with a branch id from your project. See Create a branch with the API for the full request shape.

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