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An Agent SLO Must Measure More Than Uptime

A green availability chart cannot show whether an AI agent completed the task correctly or safely. Build an SLO around verified outcomes as well as operational signals.
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An AI agent can return a successful API response and still fail the user: it may choose the wrong tool, give an incorrect answer, or take an unsafe action. Uptime measures whether a service was available under a defined measurement. An agent SLO should also measure whether the agent completed the intended task, within acceptable time and safety boundaries.

What an SLO measures—and what uptime leaves out

Google SRE defines a service-level objective (SLO) as a target value or range for a service level measured by a service-level indicator (SLI). The SLI is the measurement; the SLO is the target applied to it. Common SLIs include availability, latency, error rate, and throughput. Google SRE’s SLO guidance provides the foundational definitions.

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  • Availability: Could the user reach the service, or did the request return successfully?
  • Task success: Did the agent deliver the requested outcome to an explicitly accepted standard?
  • Execution quality: Did it select suitable tools and follow the required workflow or policy?
  • User-relevant performance: Did it finish within an acceptable end-to-end time and avoid harmful or irrelevant output?

These measures answer different questions. A request-success rate can reveal service or dependency problems, but a successful response does not establish that the agent accomplished the task. Google Cloud’s AI and ML reliability guidance recommends connecting business KPIs to request success, latency, harmful or irrelevant output, and successful agent task completion.

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Build the SLO around the agent’s actual work

There is no universal agent SLO threshold in the cited guidance. Choose indicators for the workflow, define what counts as success, and use task-specific verification rather than treating a returned answer as proof. An SLO specification is more useful when it makes clear which tasks and users are included, how outcomes are verified, the measurement window, the end-to-end latency boundary, and any exclusions. Segment by task type and risk when an aggregate could conceal failures that matter.

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Measure outcomes, not just successful requests

Track end-to-end task completion against an explicit acceptance test, such as a task-specific verifier, ground truth, or human review. Count only outcomes that meet the criteria. Keep request and dependency success as separate indicators: they help identify API and tool-call failures, but they are not substitutes for task completion.

Measure end-to-end time and output quality

Measure time to resolution across the full task, and use component measures such as time to first token when perceived responsiveness matters. For agents, end-to-end trace latency can matter more than time to first token alone. Track correctness and irrelevant or harmful output; for agents that can take actions, also measure policy violations, unsafe or unauthorized actions, and whether guardrails activated when they should. Google Cloud’s production-agent KPI guidance discusses these distinctions.

Assess tools, trajectories, and cost per success

Check whether the agent chose appropriate tools, supplied valid arguments, and followed a suitable plan. Where cost matters, calculate cost per successful task as well as cost per attempt. Google Cloud illustrates the difference with a hypothetical run costing $0.10 that fails 50% of the time: the cost per successful result is twice the per-run cost. This is an explanatory example, not an industry benchmark.

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Example targets are not agent defaults

Google Cloud’s AI/ML reliability documentation gives the following example SLO targets. They illustrate service indicators; they are not recommended universal thresholds for agent task success.

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Example indicator Google Cloud example target What it measures
Successful API responses 99.9% of API calls Request success, not whether the agent completed the user’s task
Inference latency 95th percentile below 300 ms Inference latency, not necessarily end-to-end task time
Time to first token Below 500 ms for 99% of requests Initial response timing, not task completion
Harmful output rate Below 0.1% A safety-related output measure

These are Google Cloud’s examples, accessed in 2026. Set targets that reflect the workflow and its users; do not copy them as default task-completion goals.

Evaluate the answer and the path the agent took

Final-response evaluation checks the outcome presented to the user. Trajectory evaluation checks how the agent got there, including tool calls and their order. Both matter: a plausible final answer can hide a poor or risky process, while a valid sequence of actions does not by itself prove the answer met the task criteria.

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Google Cloud’s Gen AI evaluation service documentation describes final-response and trajectory evaluation and states that the service measures an agent’s ability to complete tasks and goals for a use case. The page labels the service Preview. One named trajectory measure, exact match, checks whether reference tool calls match in the same order; other supported metrics allow extra calls or compare ordering. This is one evaluation option, not the only way to assess an agent.

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Use offline evaluation data to test whether the success definition and verifier are fit for purpose, then monitor task outcomes and operational signals in production. For actions with meaningful consequences, include a way to escalate or interrupt an agent when needed.

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Agents that act need operational controls

An agent can turn a mistaken decision into a service disruption quickly, particularly when it can change system state. In its AI engineering guidance for reliable operations, Google SRE describes practices including distinct least-privilege agent identities, agent-specific rate limits and circuit breakers, dry-run support, risk evaluation, and progressive authorization. It also describes gating higher autonomy on sustained, statistically significant success against human-verified evaluation data. These are practices described by Google SRE, not a universal certification standard.

Check whether the provider SLA covers the agent path

An SLO is an objective measured by an indicator; a service-level agreement (SLA) is a contractual commitment whose scope and exclusions depend on the particular service terms. A provider’s availability commitment may not cover every step in an agent workflow. For example, the Gemini Enterprise SLA excludes specified requests originating from built-in agents, user-defined agents, and externally integrated agents. Check the applicable terms against the actual agent path instead of assuming that the underlying provider commitment covers it. That specific exclusion does not establish how other providers’ SLAs work.

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