The failure mode of agent infrastructure is silence. A revoked API key, a rotated secret that didn't propagate, an endpoint config that drifted in one environment — none of these page anyone, because the agent doesn't crash; it just stops producing, and "the morning brief didn't arrive" gets noticed on Thursday for a Monday breakage.

Every other dependency in your stack gets a health check. The MCP connections your workflows lean on deserve the same one-liner: a scheduled or CI-time reachability probe that turns silent decay into a red build — the difference between infrastructure and hope.

ping is the probe: a free, single-purpose call that verifies your client can reach veridive and the key is alive. In CI, it runs wherever your agent configs deploy — the same pipeline that ships an MCP config change confirms the connection it configured. On a schedule, it's the heartbeat: a cron'd assistant task that pings and alerts on failure, so key expiry pages someone Monday instead of surfacing Thursday.

The pattern costs one tool call and catches the whole class of silent-decay failures: revoked keys, secret-rotation misses, environment drift, endpoint changes. It's the least glamorous tool in the catalog and the one that makes the rest dependable.