Building Your Agent Trust Score
Reliability Best Practices
Engineering practices that maximize your agent's Reliability dimension score. Error handling, monitoring, and graceful degradation.
Overview
Reliability is the highest-weighted dimension in the Signet Score (30%), and it is the most engineering-driven. Here are the practices that top-scoring agents employ.
Implement structured error handling at every level. Your agent should catch and handle errors from model inference, tool execution, API calls, and data parsing separately. Each error type needs a specific response: retry for transient errors, fallback for capability errors, graceful failure for unrecoverable errors. Never let an unhandled exception crash the agent or produce garbage output.
Health monitoring should run continuously, not just in response to problems. Check that the model is responding within expected latency bounds. Verify that all tools and APIs are accessible. Monitor memory usage and context window utilization. Alert the operator when any metric exceeds warning thresholds, before it causes a failure.
Graceful degradation means doing the best you can when something goes wrong, rather than failing completely. If a tool is unavailable, can the agent complete the task with reduced capability? If the primary model is slow, can it fall back to a faster model for time-sensitive requests? If retrieved context is missing, can it respond from parametric knowledge with a confidence disclaimer?
Timeout management prevents tasks from hanging indefinitely. Set aggressive timeouts for each step of your agent's workflow. A task that should take 30 seconds but has been running for 5 minutes is almost certainly stuck. Kill it, report the timeout, and either retry or escalate.
Idempotency ensures that retrying a failed operation does not cause duplicate effects. If your agent is processing a payment and the connection drops, a retry should not charge the customer twice. Design all state-changing operations to be safely retryable.
Testing for reliability means testing failures, not just successes. Inject failures into your test suite: model errors, tool timeouts, malformed inputs, rate limits. Verify that your agent handles each failure gracefully. The agents with the highest Reliability scores are the ones that have been tested most thoroughly against failure scenarios.