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guides

Running AI agents in production, written down.

Eleven guides. Seven are about the practice rather than about our tools: what it means to govern an agent while it is running, how to manage spend that nobody provisions, how to secure a fleet that holds credentials and calls tools, where observability stops being enough, what changes when tools arrive over a protocol, and what the tools on this market can and cannot actually do. Each one names the open-source tool that does the job, and none of them needs you to buy anything to be useful. The other four are about this stack specifically: getting a first alert, following one incident through every plane, what the shapes cost, and what the numbers do and do not establish.

start here

From zero to your first alert

One command on a box you own, one agent pointed at it, one address to write to, and then make it fire on purpose. Four steps, what each is for, and where each one goes wrong.

no account, no key, no cloudit comes up closedthe severity floorfiring it deliberately
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the umbrella

AI agent governance, and what it means at runtime

Governance is the set of controls that decide what an agent may do while it is doing it. Every question a fleet has to answer at runtime with the tool that owns it, the five decisions every governed team ends up making, and the order to adopt them in.

observability vs controlshadow modefail-open or fail-closedthe run as the unithuman in the loopevidence
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the money

FinOps for AI: managing spend that creates itself

Cloud FinOps assumes somebody provisioned the thing. Agent spend appears when an agent decides to try again. What breaks, what to instrument first, and how to report it in a format finance already reads.

LLM cost controlper-run budgetsreserve then settlecache and routerFOCUS exportcost per resolved case
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the defensive half

AI agent security: an old discipline with a new blast radius

The damage does not arrive as a sentence, it arrives as a tool call. Eight failure modes a fleet actually hits, the control that answers each, and what to rehearse in CI so a broken guardrail fails a build rather than an incident review.

prompt injection at the tool boundaryexcessive agencyshadow MCPblast radiusguardrail drills
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the comparison

AI observability and governance are not rivals

One explains what happened, the other decides what may happen. The same incident seen by each, why governance without observability is opaque, and the single integration decision that makes them compose: one run id.

tracing vs enforcementwhat to ask a vendorOTLPjoining on the run id
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the shapes

Three shapes of agent tooling, and what each cannot do

Named products change monthly and the shapes do not. What framework-native tracing, open self-hosted observability and a vendor's hosted control plane each answer, and twelve differences with a way to check every one of them.

archetypes, not vendorsenforcement in the pathwhat to verifywhere we are weaker
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the operational half

What runs where, and what it costs

One machine, a five-node cluster, or a hyperscaler. Six clusters measured across three clouds and then destroyed: what each burns per hour, the storage line that differs by a factor of 108, and a published conclusion we had to withdraw.

EUR 137 vs USD 1,487the RWX trap1.2% apart on matched silicon426 bytes per decisiona retraction
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the honest half

What is proven here, and what is not

What a measurement on this stack actually established, the limit published beside each one, three conclusions we withdrew, and the list of what nobody has established yet.

a number that cannot failthree retractionswhat is not measuredhow to read anyone's claims
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the walk-through

One incident, end to end: a runaway agent through every plane

One ordinary failure, an agent stuck in a retry loop, followed from its first over-budget call to the evidence an auditor reads months later. Eight steps, the event each one writes, and what only becomes visible in that order.

402 in the request pathallow, deny, holdwhy three weak signals joinone link, never a buttoncompleteness proofs
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the newest surface

MCP security: your tools are now a fetch, not a build

A tool used to be code you shipped. Over the Model Context Protocol it is a description you fetched, from a server that can change it after you approved it. Six failure modes, and the control that answers each.

poisoned tool descriptionsrug pullsshadow MCP serverscredential brokeringstdio vs HTTP
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the join key

Agent identity and authentication: how an agent proves who it is

A static key answers one question, badly. What an identity has to be instead, nameable, attributable, attestable and revocable, plus delegation chains, when to demand a signature per action, and how to evaluate anything in this space.

agent authenticationattestationdelegation chainsnon-human identitycredential brokering
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and then the tools

Every control in the guides has an open implementation.

Every control the guides describe has an Apache-2.0 service behind it, and they run on infrastructure you own. Walk the stack, or start the live services locally in one command and watch the money plane light up. Unfamiliar term? The glossary defines the vocabulary these guides use.