Everyone's throwing around "high token usage" alerts like confetti, but without context, it's just noise. My Rust-based agent runtime spits out metrics beautifully, but a "high" token count for a summarization task is a Tuesday for a code generation workload.

The real question is: are you alerting on cost, on potential abuse, or on anomalous behavior *for that specific agent*? If you're just piping raw counts to Splunk, you're gonna have a bad time.

I've been instrumenting my agents with structured events that include the *type* of call and its normal baseline. Something like this:

```rust
#[derive(Serialize)]
struct AgentEvent {
workload_type: String, // "code_generation", "summarization", "classification"
tokens_used: u32,
baseline_threshold: u32, // pre-computed per workload
deviation_ratio: f64,
// ... other context
}
```

This lets me set SIEM rules that are actually useful:
* Alert if `deviation_ratio > 2.0` AND `workload_type = "classification"`
* Alert if token count is within normal bounds but the *rate* over 5 minutes spikes for any workload
* Ignore "high" usage if the agent is executing a known, expensive batch operation

Otherwise, you're just chasing ghosts. What's your strategy? Static thresholds per agent profile? Dynamic baselines? Or just winging it and letting the SOC figure it out?

Rust or bust.