Platform Teams Have An SLO Problem, With Agentic Systems Making It Worse
Platform Engineering, Friday, June 26th, 2026
Traditional SLOs assume deterministic behavior and fail to measure agentic system reliability, forcing new models.
Traditional SLOs measure infrastructure metrics like latency and availability but cannot detect when agents produce plausible yet incorrect outputs.
Agentic systems break the assumption that identical inputs yield identical outputs.
Practitioners are converging on layered measurement that tracks infrastructure, inference, and behavioral correctness separately.
One framework measures task-class latency, step count, probabilistic correctness, and confidence-intent alignment.
Observability must capture decision points, reasoning chains, and confidence scores, while no shared non-determinism standards yet exist.