When the job fails, and the alert message compiled, this procedure gets called and the job name, step name, a delay value are passed to it. There is also a retry flag that comes back fro this procedure.
The first thing this procedure does is go and find the last failed step for the particular job. It then counts and based on the @retry value verifies if a retry job has already been created. This is in case some other process tries to do this same thing and should help prevent too many retries from firing off.
If a retry job does not exist, this process creates a new disposable job that will rerun the original from the beginning or the step that failed based on the checking for “Level 1” or “Level 2” in the job name. The job is prefixed with ‘Retry -‘ so it can be found easily in your server’s job list.
If a delay is specified, 2 minutes in this example, then it calculates a new run time for the retry job and finally creates the job.
This helps make SQL Agent jobs a little more robust.