T45 Dec 24, 2025 2 min read

Supervisor

A process that starts and monitors other processes, restarting them and managing their lifecycle and logs.

Definition

A supervisor is a process that starts, monitors, and controls other processes.

If the supervised process exits or crashes, the supervisor may restart it, collect logs, and enforce shutdown behavior.

Examples

  • systemd
  • container runtimes and orchestrators
  • language specific process managers

Why it matters

The supervisor is the component that decides what happens after a process ends.

That makes it the place where exit codes, restarts, and signals become policy.