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Reliability Analytics & Self-Serve Tooling1 / 2

1 min lesson

Censoring and survivorship

Use "Survivorship bias is the same trap from the other side" to describe the practical rule.

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Censoring and survivorship

An aborted or still-running agent turn is right-censored: you know it took at least this long, not how long it finally took. Treating it as a completed fast request or dropping it, both bias you toward looking healthier than you are. Survivorship bias is the same trap from the other side: if only successful runs reach the table you analyze, your success rate is a tautology.

Watch out

Don't compute success rate over only the runs that produced a final event. The runs that hung, timed out or were killed are the failures you care about and they're the ones most likely to be missing from a naive table. Always reconcile your denominator against admitted attempts, not completed ones.

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Optional practice

Practice: Censoring and survivorship