Event capture is asynchronous. The SDK does not call Forge while serving a merchant response. Events are held in a bounded in-memory queue and sent in batches; prolonged outages, overload, abrupt worker exits, or a failed shutdown flush can lose activity. Multi-worker deployments have separate queues. Use shutdown() after draining traffic when your adapter needs explicit shutdown. Invalid configuration is different from a collector outage. By default the Node and Python SDKs log configuration errors and leave instrumentation disabled while the merchant API continues. While disabled, the SDK still removes agent_context from requests and does nothing else, so agents that send it are never rejected by strict request validators. strict: true (Node) or strict=True (Python) raises instead. Check diagnostics for enabled, configuration errors, dropped events, and the last error; an HTTP 200 from the merchant does not prove the SDK is active. Your payment integration, not Forge, decides whether payment succeeded. Do not infer settlement from a 2xx response or an incoming payment signature alone.