The status of a family or suite is the inherited most significant status of all its children.
Table 2-1 shows the order of importance of the different statuses and some examples of the result of family status, depending on its children.
Table 2 1 Table of importance of a node status
| Unknown | Least Significant |
| Complete | |
| Queued | |
| Submitted | |
| Active | |
| Suspended | |
| Aborted | Most important for a task |
| Shutdown | ecFlow server node only |
| Halted | Most important, only for ecFlow server node |
Table 2 2 Example of how the status of a family is reported
| Status of a family | |||||||||||
| After begin command | First job sent | Second job sent | A few tasks running | One task aborts! | In the end, complete | ||||||
| family | task1 | family | task1 | family | task1 | family | task1 | family | task1 | family | task1 |
| task2 | task2 | task2 | task2 | task2 | task2 | ||||||
| task3 | task3 | task3 | task3 | task3 | task3 | ||||||
| task4 | task4 | task4 | task4 | task4 | task4 | ||||||
The status of the ecFlow server itself can be:
- Shutdown: Server is not scheduling jobs anymore but allows tasks to communicate, or user to execute jobs.
- Halted: Server is not scheduling and does not allow tasks to communicate with it. This is the default status when the server is started. This is needed since recovery is only possible if the server is halted.