Agent Validation Monitors function similarly to Validation Monitors but operate on fields within agent traces.

Creating Agent Validation Monitors

Agent Validation monitors can be created by navigating to Add monitor → Agent Validation.

Choose data

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If your agent does not appear for selection in the Choose data → Agent list, Monte Carlo has not yet detected telemetry flowing into your warehouse. Verify that your agent is properly instrumented and that you've configured the agent trace table from the Agent Observability settings page.

1. Agent: Select an agent to monitor. The agent appears here once telemetry is flowing into your warehouse.
2. Monitor: Select which spans within the agent trace you want the monitor to track.
   • Entire trace — monitor metrics aggregated across all spans in the trace
   • Specific spans — monitor metrics for individual spans
3. Optional filters: Refine which traces or spans are included by filtering on fields available based on monitor selection in step 2.
4. Time Filter: Select a time window of last hour, day, or week. This monitor validates new traces that appear within this time window each time it runs.
   • Note: The time window cannot be greater than the schedule interval.

Define alert conditions

Alert conditions determine when Monte Carlo should generate a new Alert based on the Validations you've configured.

Users can set alert conditions on the fields that are available for Entire trace or Specific spans. The validations available are the same as the ones present in Validation Monitor and follow the same data type restrictions.

Define schedule

Select when the monitor should run. Agent Validation monitors run according to the schedule defined below.

• On a schedule: Input a regular, periodic schedule. Options for handling daylight savings are available in the advanced dropdown.
• manual: User can run this monitor manually on demand.

Send notifications

Select which audiences should receive notifications when an anomaly is detected.

Additional settings exist for setting the description of the monitor which will be set as the header for notifications sent to notification channels, also pre-setting a priority on any incidents generated by the monitor.

See here for more information on Audiences and Notifications. Learn more about setting Monitor tags.

Notes

Text in the Notes section will be included directly in notifications. The "Show notes tips" dropdown includes details on how to @mention an individual or team if you are sending notifications to Slack.

Notes support rich-text formatting, including bold, italic, underline, strike-through, lists, links, and code blocks. Rich-text channels display these styles, while text-only channels show a plain-text equivalent.

Monitor properties can be dynamically inserted into Notes through variables. Supported variables include Created by, Last updated at, Last updated by, Priority, Tags and—for Validation and Custom SQL monitors—Query Result.

Alerts and Notifications

Alerts

Agent Validation Monitors generate an Alert whenever traces breach the defined alert conditions.

Alerts from Validation Monitors include the following details:

• Number of traces that violated the conditions
• List of the invalid traces
• Historical graph of previous breaches

Notifications

Alert notifications are sent to your configured audiences and include:

• Description of the condition that was violated
• Number of traces that breached the alert condition
• Details about the most recent breach