Governed actions
A governed action is one agent action that Aethis evaluated and recorded. It is the unit Aethis counts against your plan’s monthly allowance.
The count follows evaluation, not execution. An action counts once Aethis has evaluated it and written its Action Record, whether the decision was to allow it, block it, or hold it for approval.
Counting rules
Section titled “Counting rules”| Scenario | Governed actions |
|---|---|
| One model call | 1 |
| One tool call | 1 |
| One model call followed by 4 governed tool calls | 5 |
| An action blocked by policy | 1 |
| An action waiting for approval | 1 |
| An idempotent retry of the same action | 1 total |
| MCP discovery, health checks and pings | 0 |
Why a model call and its tool calls count separately
Section titled “Why a model call and its tool calls count separately”A model deciding to issue a refund and the refund being issued are two actions with two consequences. Aethis evaluates each one, and either can be allowed, held or blocked on its own. A turn with one model call and four governed tool calls is five governed actions.
Why blocked and held actions count
Section titled “Why blocked and held actions count”A blocked or held action still needed Aethis to identify the Agent, evaluate policy, reach a decision and write an Action Record. The governance work happened even though nothing ran upstream.
Retries
Section titled “Retries”An idempotent retry of the same action belongs to the original governed action and doesn’t add to the count.
What doesn’t count
Section titled “What doesn’t count”Traffic that carries no agent action: MCP tool discovery, health checks and pings.
Governed actions are not spend
Section titled “Governed actions are not spend”Your plan allowance is measured in governed actions per month. It is not a spending limit and it is not a count of model requests.
To limit monetary spend, set the workspace Monthly spend cap. Agent pages track Spend this month against an Agent Monthly spend cap, with an Alert at warning threshold, so you can identify which workload is contributing to the total. See Manage spend and usage.
See Plans and governed actions for each plan’s allowance.