At 09:12, workers are 62% utilized and every health check is green. At 09:14, users receive results after their deadlines. CPU never crossed the alert threshold; the queue accumulated work faster than it could drain. Utilization describes resource occupancy. It does not tell whether queued work can still finish on time. For each job, record: deadline_slack = deadline - now - estimated_service_time When slack is negative, starting the job cannot meet its declared deadline ...