Foundations
Foundations
What You're Measuring and How You're Measuring It
Your agent passes testing, fails in production. Another completes tasks while taking paths you can't see are fragile. A third does exactly what it should but scores zero on task completion. The evaluation says "working"—but working how? Teams get confusing results not because agents are unpredictable, but because what they're measuring and how they're measuring it answer different questions entirely.
What You're Measuring and How You're Measuring It
Your agent passes testing, fails in production. Another completes tasks while taking paths you can't see are fragile. A third does exactly what it should but scores zero on task completion. The evaluation says "working"—but working how? Teams get confusing results not because agents are unpredictable, but because what they're measuring and how they're measuring it answer different questions entirely.
Tools & Techniques
When Restarting From Scratch Costs Less Than Saving Progress
The alert fires at 2am. Workflow crashed at step four of seven. Should those three successful steps have been saved somewhere? For teams running thousands of high-frequency workflows daily, the answer surprises: restart from scratch. The coordination overhead—state management across workers, cleanup routines, synchronization delays—costs more than re-executing from the beginning. At certain scales and workflow durations, accepting occasional failures beats implementing elaborate persistence. Production math reveals when operational simplicity wins.
What It Actually Takes to Resume a Crashed Workflow
A compliance workflow authenticates, scrapes forty pages of transaction history, then waits three hours for manual legal review before continuing. You can't keep a browser running that long. Sessions expire, memory leaks accumulate, containers get recycled on schedule. The workflow must terminate and resume hours later with state intact. For teams running long workflows across distributed fleets, checkpoints stop being optional. But state persistence brings specific overhead: synchronization delays, cleanup routines, session tracking across workers. Here's what coordination actually requires.
Pattern Recognition
Four identity vendors shipped agent-specific IAM within three weeks. Microsoft's Entra Agent ID launched January 20. Cloud Security Alliance released MAESTRO framework January 15. Qualys shipped Agent Grant January 6. Exabeam rolled out Agent Behavior Analytics earlier that month.
Traditional IAM expects identities to last months or years. Agents live seconds or minutes. Legacy systems track human credentials. Agents operate through delegation chains nothing was built to monitor.
Security audits keep finding thousands of ungoverned agent identities already running. Some organizations hit 17 agents per employee. Vendors watched the same pattern repeat: customers discovering agent sprawl they never authorized, never tracked, couldn't govern with existing tools.
