---
title: "Monitoring · agent topology · Agent Fieldbook"
url: https://agentfieldbook.org/design/topologies/sentinel/
description: "Dormant bell with trailing sensors; wakes on signal."
section: "Design · Topologies"
source: Agent Fieldbook — generated from the published page
---

# Monitoring

Dormant bell with trailing sensors; wakes on signal.

A sentinel agent sits dormant and watches: it consumes a stream of signals and stays idle until a trigger condition fires, then wakes, acts, and returns to watching. It trades continuous reasoning for cheap, event-gated attention, which suits monitoring, alerting and security work where most of the time nothing should happen. In anatomy terms it is a transport-heavy, low-duty-cycle core wired to sensors and a wake condition.

## In the anatomy

Sensors and transports feed a dormant reasoning core; a wake condition (a rule or a model) gates activation; effectors fire only on trigger; the perimeter governs the response actions.

## At a glance

| Field | Value |
| --- | --- |
| Pattern | Monitoring |
| State model | durable |
| Example | Observability / alerting agents |

## Common use cases

## Strengths

## Weaknesses

## Agents using this pattern · 10

Mapping classified by the Field Book from each agent's documented control flow.

## Basis

Description, use cases and trade-offs: Field Book analysis, synthesised from established agent-architecture literature.