Show HN: Apgar – Catch agent regressions without an LLM judge

Release health for AI agents.

Website · Quickstart · How it works · Self-hosting

Agents don't crash when they get worse. Apgar watches the first hours of every release and tells you whether your agent started behaving worse than on the release before it: more tool errors, retries and loops, fewer tool calls, shorter answers, higher cost or latency. It works from the traces you already collect, on all traffic, with no LLM judge, no dataset, and no stored prompt or completion text.

Send traces over OpenTelemetry or from Langfuse, tag each deploy with a release attribute, and get one Slack message or webhook per release. Apgar says which signal moved and where the change is concentrated.

Install

Apgar runs on Docker Compose or, with a Helm chart, on Kubernetes. Docker Compose needs Docker with Compose v2.

mkdir apgar && cd apgar
curl -fsSLO https://github.com/oimo-ai/apgar/releases/latest/download/docker-compose.yml
cat > .env <<EOF
APGAR_SECRET_KEY=$(openssl rand -hex 32)
APGAR_ADMIN_TOKEN=$(openssl rand -hex 16)
CLICKHOUSE_PASSWORD=$(openssl rand -hex 16)
APGAR_PUBLIC_URL=http://localhost:8080
EOF
docker compose up -d --wait

Open http://localhost:8080 and sign in with the value of APGAR_ADMIN_TOKEN in .env. While no agent exists, the Agents page offers demo data to explore.

Use with a coding agent

Give Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, or another coding agent the Apgar skill before it sets up an integration:

npx skills add https://docs.useapgar.dev

Then copy and paste this prompt to the agent:

Use the Apgar skill. Look at this codebase and tell me what has to change so that every release of this agent can be compared in Apgar: the traces, the release attribute, and anything the instrumentation leaves out. Do not change code until I agree.

Use with AI agents also covers the docs MCP server.

Upgrade

Read the release notes and back up ClickHouse before every upgrade. Docker Compose and Kubernetes list the steps.

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md.

License

Apache-2.0. See LICENSE.