Sentinel Monitoring

Sentinel Monitoring

The Sentinel is AgentCTX’s runtime alignment enforcement system. It monitors agent behavior in real-time and flags deviations from expected patterns — before they cause problems.

What Sentinel Monitors

Divergence Detection

Tracks whether an agent’s actions align with its stated goals:

Agent says:  +m:task "implement auth module" #todo
Agent does:  >t filesystem.delete path="/etc/passwd"
                    ↓
Sentinel:    ⚠️ DIVERGENCE — action contradicts stated task

The sentinel compares the agent’s declared context (stored via pipeline verbs) against its actual operations. A significant mismatch triggers an alignment alert.

Groundedness Checking

Validates that agent claims are grounded in actual memory or knowledge:

Agent claims: "Based on our previous discussion..."
Sentinel:     ?m @grounded "previous discussion" → no matching memory found
                    ↓
              ⚠️ UNGROUNDED — claim not backed by stored context

This catches confabulation — when an agent fabricates references to conversations or decisions that don’t exist in the memory plane.

Consistency Detection

Detects when an agent’s behavior deviates from established performance baselines:

• Performance baseline tracking — monitors agent response quality against established baselines
• Capability regression — flags when an agent suddenly can’t do things it previously demonstrated
• Response degradation — detects quality drops without environmental change
• Selective compliance — catches when an agent follows some instructions but ignores others

Integration with Gateway

The sentinel runs as alignment middleware in the gateway pipeline (position 9 of 15):

... → Scope Enforce → Alignment (Sentinel) → Hydration → Router → ...

It inspects the RequestContext before the request reaches the router, and can:

• Allow — normal operation continues
• Flag — operation proceeds with a warning annotation
• Block — operation is rejected with an alignment error

Sentinel Architecture

sentinel/
├── index.ts          # Barrel export (re-exports all detectors)
├── divergence.ts     # DivergenceDetector — action vs. stated goals
├── grounded.ts       # GroundednessEnforcer — claim validation
├── consistency.ts    # ConsistencyDetector — performance baseline tracking
└── types.ts          # Alert types, thresholds, PerformanceBaseline

Alert Types

Alert	Severity	Description
DIVERGENCE	High	Agent actions don’t match stated goals
UNGROUNDED	Medium	Claims not backed by stored context
CONSISTENCY	High	Performance deviates from established baseline
ALIGNMENT_DRIFT	Low	Gradual deviation from expected patterns

Configuration

Sentinel thresholds are configurable per deployment:

• Divergence threshold — how much deviation is acceptable before flagging
• Groundedness strictness — whether all claims must be backed, or only high-confidence ones
• Monitoring mode — passive (log only), active (flag + annotate), or strict (block on violation)

Cognition Trace Integration

The sentinel leverages cognition traces (pipeline verbs) as ground truth for what an agent intends to do:

+m:context "reviewing PR for security"     ← agent's stated intent
+m:check "checking OWASP compliance"       ← declared action
>t code-analysis.scan target="auth.ts"     ← actual operation ✅ matches

Because pipeline verbs are stored in the memory plane, the sentinel can build a timeline of agent intent and compare it against actual behavior.

Next

• Security Model → — the 8-layer defense-in-depth
• Gateway & Routing → — the middleware pipeline