agent-vitals 1.0.0

Standalone agent health monitor — detect loops, stuck states, thrash, and runaway costs in any AI agent workflow.

Agent Vitals

Standalone agent health monitor — detect loops, stuck states, thrash, and runaway costs in any AI agent workflow.

Agent Vitals watches your LLM agent's vital signs in real time. Feed it four numbers per step and it tells you when your agent is looping, stuck, thrashing, or burning tokens for nothing.

Install

pip install agent-vitals

Quick Start

from agent_vitals import AgentVitals

monitor = AgentVitals(mission_id="my-task")

for step in range(max_steps):
    result = call_llm(prompt)
    findings = extract_findings(result)

    snapshot = monitor.step(
        findings_count=len(findings),
        coverage_score=compute_coverage(findings),
        total_tokens=result.usage.total_tokens,
        error_count=error_tracker.count,
    )

    if snapshot.any_failure:
        print(f"Health issue at step {snapshot.loop_index}: "
              f"{snapshot.stuck_trigger or snapshot.loop_trigger}")
        break

Features

• 4-field minimum: Only findings_count, coverage_score, total_tokens, error_count required
• Zero-config defaults: AgentVitals() works out of the box with tuned thresholds
• Framework-agnostic: No dependency on LangChain, LangGraph, or any agent framework
• Immutable snapshots: Every step() returns a VitalsSnapshot with signals, metrics, and detection results
• JSONL export: Auto-log every snapshot to structured JSONL files
• Backtest harness: Offline evaluation of recorded trajectories with P/R/F1 metrics
• Context manager: with AgentVitals(...) as monitor: for clean resource management

Detection Modes

Detector	What it catches	Signal
Loop	Agent repeating actions without progress	Findings plateau over N steps
Stuck	Coverage stagnation despite continued work	Low DM + low CV on coverage
Thrash	Excessive errors indicating instability	Error count above threshold
Runaway Cost	Token burn with no output	Token spike with flat findings

API Overview

Manual Integration (Recommended)

from agent_vitals import AgentVitals

monitor = AgentVitals(mission_id="research-task")
snapshot = monitor.step(
    findings_count=5,
    coverage_score=0.6,
    total_tokens=12000,
    error_count=0,
)

print(snapshot.health_state)     # "healthy" | "warning" | "critical"
print(snapshot.any_failure)      # True if loop or stuck detected
print(snapshot.stuck_trigger)    # e.g. "coverage_stagnation", "burn_rate_anomaly"

Adapter Integration

from agent_vitals import AgentVitals
from agent_vitals.adapters import TelemetryAdapter

monitor = AgentVitals(mission_id="my-task", adapter=TelemetryAdapter())
snapshot = monitor.step_from_state({
    "cumulative_outputs": 5,
    "coverage_score": 0.6,
    "cumulative_tokens": 12000,
    "cumulative_errors": 0,
})

Pre-built Signals

from agent_vitals import AgentVitals, RawSignals

monitor = AgentVitals(mission_id="my-task")
signals = RawSignals(findings_count=5, coverage_score=0.6, total_tokens=12000, error_count=0)
snapshot = monitor.step_from_signals(signals)

Export

Log every snapshot to JSONL for offline analysis or observability pipelines.

from agent_vitals import AgentVitals, JSONLExporter

exporter = JSONLExporter(
    directory="./vitals_logs",
    layout="per_run",       # or "append"
    max_bytes=10_000_000,   # rotation threshold (append mode)
)

with AgentVitals(mission_id="my-task", exporters=[exporter]) as monitor:
    for step in range(max_steps):
        monitor.step(findings_count=..., coverage_score=..., total_tokens=..., error_count=...)
# Exporter is automatically flushed and closed on exit

Layouts:

• per_run: {directory}/{mission_id}/{run_id}.jsonl — one file per run
• append: {directory}/{mission_id}.jsonl — all runs in one file, with rotation

Configuration

from agent_vitals import AgentVitals, VitalsConfig

# From constructor kwargs
monitor = AgentVitals(config=VitalsConfig(
    loop_consecutive_count=6,
    stuck_dm_threshold=0.15,
))

# From YAML file
monitor = AgentVitals.from_yaml("thresholds.yaml")

# From environment variables (VITALS_* prefix)
monitor = AgentVitals()  # auto-reads VITALS_LOOP_CONSECUTIVE_COUNT, etc.

Key Thresholds

Parameter	Default	Description
loop_consecutive_count	5	Steps of flat findings before loop detection
stuck_dm_threshold	0.15	DM below this → coverage stagnation
stuck_cv_threshold	0.5	CV below this → low variation
burn_rate_multiplier	2.0	Token spike ratio for burn rate anomaly

Backtest

Evaluate detection accuracy against labeled trajectory corpora.

from agent_vitals.backtest import load_dataset, load_labels, run_backtest

dataset = load_dataset("path/to/traces/")
labels = load_labels("path/to/labels.json")
report = run_backtest(dataset, labels)

print(f"vitals.any: P={report.composite_any.precision:.3f} "
      f"R={report.composite_any.recall:.3f} "
      f"F1={report.composite_any.f1:.3f}")

for name, detector in report.detectors.items():
    print(f"  {name}: P={detector.precision:.3f} R={detector.recall:.3f}")

Session Summary

monitor = AgentVitals(mission_id="my-task")
# ... run steps ...
summary = monitor.summary()
# {"mission_id": "my-task", "total_steps": 8, "health_state": "healthy",
#  "any_loop_detected": False, "any_stuck_detected": False, ...}

monitor.reset()  # Clear history for next run (also flushes exporters)

License

MIT — see LICENSE.