LOGGING, METRICS, AND DASHBOARDS

SERVICE LEVELS IN PLAIN WORDS Teams often set a target for how well a system should perform, such as "ninety-five percent of runs succeed and ninety-five percent finish within thirty seconds." Such a target is called a service level objective. The metric that measures it is a service level indicator. Having a clear target turns arguments about whether the agent is good enough into simple comparisons of a number against a goal. It also tells you when to stop adding features and spend time on reliability, namely when the numbers fall below the target. EXAMPLES Example 1: Structured versus free text A structured entry records the timestamp, the agent identifier, the event "tool_call", the tool "search_web", and a duration of 420 milliseconds. A program can count all slow search calls instantly, which it cannot do with a free-text sentence. Example 2: Three metrics together In one week success rate fell from ninety-four to eighty-one percent, latency rose from three to eleven seconds, and cost per run rose from two cents to nine cents. Together they suggest an upstream model or tool change. Example 3: An alert An alert fires when the success rate stays below a set limit for fifteen minutes. An on-call engineer is paged before most users notice. Example 4: Drift Average response length has grown by forty percent in three months with no code change. Drift monitoring flags it for investigation even though nothing is technically broken.