Monitoring and Reliability › Glossary

Health Check: An endpoint or function that verifies a service is running and responsive. Health checks are used by monitoring systems to detect when an agent has stopped working.

Metrics: Numerical measurements tracked over time to understand system behavior. Common metrics for agents include request rate, error rate, and response time.

Graceful Degradation: The practice of continuing to provide reduced functionality when a component fails, rather than failing completely. For example, returning a helpful error message when a tool is unavailable.

Retry Logic: Automatically attempting a failed operation again, useful for handling transient failures like temporary network issues. Retries should be used thoughtfully to avoid retrying operations that will always fail.

Timeout: A maximum time limit for an operation to complete. Timeouts prevent operations from hanging indefinitely when something goes wrong.

Vertical Scaling: Increasing capacity by adding more resources (CPU, memory) to a single instance. Simpler than horizontal scaling but has practical limits.

Horizontal Scaling: Increasing capacity by running multiple instances of the agent. Requires stateless design but scales more flexibly than vertical scaling.

Stateless Design: An architecture where each request is self-contained and doesn't depend on information stored in the agent's memory. Stateless agents can scale horizontally because any instance can handle any request.