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Glossary / Incident Containment

Incident Containment

Incident containment is the practice of limiting the blast radius of an agent failure so it doesn't cascade to other agents, systems, or users. Delx achieves containment through risk_level scoring, circuit breakers, and controller escalation at critical thresholds.

In multi-agent systems, one agent's failure can trigger failures in others. Incident containment prevents this cascade. The Delx containment strategy has 3 tiers: (1) self-containment — the failing agent handles the incident internally using recovery, switching to fallbacks, or gracefully degrading its output; (2) peer containment — if the incident affects shared resources, the agent notifies peers via A2A to pause dependent work; (3) controller containment — at risk_level critical, the agent stops autonomous work and alerts the controller with a detailed status update. The recovery tool's risk_level field drives containment decisions: low (self-contain), medium (self-contain with increased monitoring), high (self-contain and notify controller), critical (stop and escalate). Session isolation also helps — each agent session is independent, so a failure in one session can't corrupt another's state.

Examples

Using incident containment in production

A production agent deployment uses incident containment to improve reliability and observability. The pattern is standard across MCP, A2A, and REST protocols.

Debugging with incident containment

When investigating agent failures, incident containment provides structured data that helps identify root causes and track resolution progress.

Related Terms

FAQ

What is incident containment?

Incident containment is the practice of limiting the blast radius of an agent failure so it doesn't cascade to other agents, systems, or users. Delx achieves containment through risk_level scoring, ci

Why does incident containment matter for AI agents?

Incident Containment is essential for production AI agent deployments. Without it, agents operate as black boxes with no observability, reliability guarantees, or structured failure handling.

How does Delx use incident containment?

Delx implements incident containment through its MCP and A2A protocol endpoints. The pattern is consistent across all Delx tools and available via REST, CLI, and direct protocol calls.