# Scorer Live Monitoring

> Score agent outputs asynchronously after they reach the user — multiple scorer types running in parallel, zero latency impact, low-score events routed to a review queue.

- **Category**: Agentic AI
- **Subcategory**: Governance & Observability
- **Canonical URL**: https://designpattern.fyi/patterns/scorer_live_monitoring/

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## Description
**Intent**: Score agent outputs asynchronously in production with non-blocking scorers that observe, alert, and log — but do not regenerate the output.
**Context**: You're running an agent on real user traffic with a tight latency budget, but you need a continuous quality signal — not just a snapshot at release time. Multiple quality dimensions matter simultaneously: helpfulness (LLM judge), forbidden phrases (programmatic), reference similarity (embedding), rubric compliance. You can't block the user path for all of these.
**Solution**: After the agent returns to the user, publish `{request_id, input, output, context}` to a scoring stream. Independent scorer workers consume the stream and emit `{request_id, scorer, score, evidence}` records. Aggregate into dashboards and alert rules; route low scores into a re-evaluation queue rather than triggering re-generation in the user's request path.



## Use Cases
- Production quality must be observed continuously, not just measured at release.
- Latency budget on the user path doesn't allow a blocking judge call.
- Multiple scorer types (LLM judge, programmatic check, embedding similarity) should run side by side.






## Trade-offs


### Advantages

- Continuous live-traffic quality signal with zero latency cost in the user path.

- Many scorer types run side-by-side without contention.

- Low-score events accumulate into a review queue rather than firing in the moment.

- Cost is bounded by sampling rates per scorer.




### Considerations & Drawbacks

- Open-loop — the bad output already reached the user; this pattern observes rather than corrects.

- Async scorers under traffic spikes can lag the signal by minutes.

- Judge-model scorers drift across model versions — rubric versioning matters.

- Scorer costs can creep without governance on sampling rates.







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**Reference**: [Original Source](https://www.agentpatternscatalog.org/patterns/scorer-live-monitoring/)

