---
title: "Monitoring vs blocking: what the terms mean · Audon"
description: "Monitoring vs blocking: Alerts evaluate complete UTC days of provider billing data, which can lag by hours."
url: https://audon.ai/glossary/monitoring-vs-blocking
last_updated: 2026-11-02
---
# Monitoring vs blocking: what the terms mean

Alerts evaluate complete UTC days of provider billing data, which can lag by hours.

Spend and savings

## Monitoring vs blocking

Alerts evaluate complete UTC days of provider billing data, which can lag by hours. They are monitoring, not real-time spend blocking.

One of the terms Agent Spend Optimization uses for every amount it shows: amounts in different evidence classes are never added together.

Used in [Agent Spend Optimization](https://audon.ai/product/agent-spend-optimization) · [Methodology](https://audon.ai/product/agent-spend-optimization#methodology)

## Related terms.

- [Observed spend

   Invoice-aligned, provider-reported cost for the selected UTC days.](https://audon.ai/glossary/observed-spend)
- [Anomalous spend

   Observed spend with features that indicate a possible problem (e.g. a day more than 2.5× its trailing 14-day median).](https://audon.ai/glossary/anomalous-spend)
- [Potential saving

   A modelled reduction if a proposed change works, under stated assumptions.](https://audon.ai/glossary/potential-saving)
- [Validated opportunity

   A scoped, feasible change with supporting evidence and a computable expected benefit, confirmed by a person.](https://audon.ai/glossary/validated-opportunity)
- [Verified saving

   A measured reduction in cost per verified successful task in the latest recorded experiment on production traffic, approved and verified by people other than those who proposed it and recorded the results, with no success-rate drop greater than 2 percentage points, no p95 latency increase greater than 20%, and at least 30 verified successes per window.](https://audon.ai/glossary/verified-saving)
- [Cost per verified successful task

   Cost per verified successful task = Σ attributable run costs ÷ count of verified successful runs.](https://audon.ai/glossary/cost-per-verified-successful-task)

[All terms](https://audon.ai/glossary)

Last updated 2 November 2026

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