What you'll learn

• How to choose restart and isolation strategy by workload type
• How to instrument command latency, queue depth, and error classes
• How to define SLO-oriented alerting for agent systems
• How to practice failure drills before incidents

Prerequisites

• You are comfortable reading supervision trees
• You have used telemetry events in Phoenix or Elixir systems
• You understand transient vs persistent failures

Lesson Breakdown

1. Supervision strategy: map agent classes to restart policies.
2. Back-pressure controls: monitor queue depth and command latency.
3. Telemetry design: emit events with stable dimensions and cardinality limits.
4. Failure modes: dependency outage, malformed signal bursts, hot loop bugs.
5. Runbooks: define triage, containment, recovery, and postmortem steps.

Hands-on Exercise

Create a production-readiness checklist for one critical agent flow:

1. Draw the supervision tree and identify blast radius boundaries.
2. Add telemetry around command duration and failures.
3. Simulate an upstream outage and verify graceful degradation.
4. Simulate malformed signal floods and validate rate limiting behavior.
5. Write a runbook with rollback and verification steps.

Validation Checklist

• [ ] Supervision strategy and restart intensity are documented.
• [ ] Telemetry covers latency, failures, and throughput.
• [ ] At least one outage drill has been run in a staging environment.
• [ ] On-call runbook includes concrete rollback and verification commands.

Next Module

You completed the initial curriculum. Revisit Agent Fundamentals on the BEAM to onboard teammates, then iterate with workload-specific modules.