Discovery timeout to chanve severity level for route connections messages.

Proposed change

Add a parameter for example "discovery_timeout" so if any route connection error occurs during that period of time. Then the severity level for that message would be INFO instead of error. The reason would be to avoid false alarms because of an elevated severity.

cluster {
  discovery_timeout: 10s
}

The messages that we want to prevent:

2026/09/13 03:32:15.057602 [ERR] Error trying to connect to route (attempt 1): lookup for host "node1.mydomain": lookup node1.mydomain on 127.0.0.11:53: no such host

The proposed change:

2026/09/13 03:32:15.057602 [INF] Trying to discover route (attempt 1): lookup for host "node1.mydomain": lookup node1.mydomain on 127.0.0.11:53: no such host

Use case

During startup on a NATS cluster, some messages could cause confusion because of the level of severity for route connection errors. For example, if we have a cluster with many nodes, they could start trying to connect to each other and sending errors to the log console because of some startup conditions, such as DNS server or NATS nodes still loading, which is expected for a reasoable period of time. So, by lowering down the level of severity for connection errors we can avoid creating false alarms because of a relative slow startup.

Contribution

Yes, I can contribute if that helps.

Submission acknowledgment

• I am a human being writing in my own words and not an AI agent. I will not use an AI agent to communicate on my behalf in this issue, either directly or via copy-paste.