# Is agent reliability the same as uptime?

No. Uptime tracks whether the service responded: the process didn't crash, the request didn't time out, the span closed without an error status. None of that says whether the agent did the right thing. A tool call that returns success and writes nothing looks identical, on an uptime dashboard, to one that worked. So does an answer that got shorter or wronger after a fallback kicked in. The span still closes clean, because nothing in the transport layer knows the content was bad. Reliability has to look inside the response: whether the tool call actually had the claimed effect, whether the answer used the right facts, whether the agent did what the user asked. A system can run with high uptime and be unreliable in this sense the whole time, because the two numbers measure different layers of the same request.

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Source: https://tessary.ai/answers/agent-reliability/is-agent-reliability-the-same-as-uptime
More on Agent reliability: https://tessary.ai/answers/agent-reliability
From Tessary, agent reliability for AI agents in production: https://tessary.ai