Protocol Monitoring

At 946 messages per day, you cannot inspect individual messages. You monitor aggregates. The five key protocol metrics: delivery rate (percentage of messages successfully delivered — target: 99.97%), latency distribution (p50, p90, p99 delivery times), bounce rate (percentage rejected for schema violations — target: under 1%), priority distribution (P0-P3 percentages versus targets), and channel throughput (messages per channel per hour).

Each metric has an alerting threshold. Delivery rate below 99.50% triggers an investigation. P90 latency above 30 seconds triggers a performance review. Bounce rate above 3% triggers a schema audit. Priority inflation above 25% P1 triggers a priority recalibration. These thresholds are not arbitrary — they represent the inflection points where protocol degradation becomes visible in agent output quality.