diff --git a/DESIGN-a2a-agents.md b/DESIGN-a2a-agents.md
index d7396aa2..48cdf1c6 100644
--- a/DESIGN-a2a-agents.md
+++ b/DESIGN-a2a-agents.md
@@ -24,8 +24,8 @@ rule. This document is the reference; the Kanboard A2A tasks implement it.
 - **Context ref** — a pointer (Hindsight bank id, git ref, KB task id, file
   path) passed *instead of* pasted content.
 - **fabric-keeper** — the janitor daemon owning time semantics (§6b): lease
-  sweeps, deadlines, cron catch-up, dead-letter, inbox digests. It never
-  assigns work.
+  sweeps, deadlines, dead-letter, inbox digests. It never assigns work and
+  never triggers work.
 
 ## 1. Why
 
@@ -298,14 +298,39 @@ four concerns, each with its own owner:
 | Triggering | when do tasks appear? | OpenClaw cron, agents' delayed self-submissions, humans |
 | Dispatch | which task runs next? | each queue's worker (claim by priority under its a(t)) |
 | Admission | may it run now? | LiteLLM budgets/rate + the budget governor |
-| **Time semantics** | deadlines, missed crons, stuck tasks? | **the fabric-keeper** |
+| **Time semantics** | expired leases, deadlines, stuck tasks? | **the fabric-keeper** |
+| Failure/anomaly response | something went wrong — now what? | Zabbix → the ops-agent (§6d) |
 
-The **fabric-keeper** is one tiny always-on daemon that never assigns work: it
-sweeps expired leases back to queued, enforces deadlines (escalating to
-inboxes), applies per-schedule **cron catch-up policy** (missed window →
-run-once | skip, configured per schedule), moves poison tasks to dead-letter,
-emits the human daily digest, and exports queue depths to Zabbix. Deadline and
-catch-up semantics live here and nowhere else.
+The **fabric-keeper** is one tiny always-on daemon that neither assigns nor
+triggers work. It sweeps expired leases back to queued, enforces task deadlines
+(escalating to the responsible inbox), moves poison tasks to dead-letter, emits
+the human daily digest, and exports queue depths/ages to Zabbix.
+
+Its defining property is being **off the critical path**: kill it and work still
+flows (workers keep pulling and running) — only hygiene degrades. That is what
+separates a janitor from a scheduler, which in a push system would stop
+everything.
+
+**Deliberately NOT a keeper duty: missed crons.** A cron window missed because
+the host was down is not a task-lifecycle event — it's an *operational fault*,
+and re-firing it would make the keeper a trigger. Instead: schedules that must
+not be missed are **monitored in Zabbix** (a missed run raises a warning like
+any other infra fault), and the response is handled per-incident, not by a
+blanket catch-up policy (§6d).
+
+### 6d. Faults are incidents, not keeper chores
+
+Anything that "went wrong" — a missed critical cron, a service down, a queue
+backing up, a stale backup — surfaces as a **Zabbix problem**. Zabbix is the
+single place operational faults are detected.
+
+Response is **per-incident, not global**: each Zabbix problem class gets its own
+mitigation path, expressed as a task. Later this is automated by a dedicated
+**ops-agent** — a worker that watches Zabbix problems and, per problem class,
+either applies a known mitigation or files a task (to the right agent, or to a
+human inbox) with the incident as context. One blanket "catch-up policy" would
+be exactly the wrong abstraction: a missed briefing, a missed backup and a
+missed consolidation want completely different responses.
 
 ### 6c. Kanboard is tier-0 now
 
@@ -371,8 +396,8 @@ Added in v2.1 (hardening review, same day):
 15. Done column = unverified completion; closed task = verified; the producer
     never closes its own task.
 16. Scheduler = decomposed (cron/self-submission triggers; workers dispatch;
-    LiteLLM+governor admit); the **fabric-keeper** janitor owns time semantics;
-    cron catch-up policy is per-schedule config.
+    LiteLLM+governor admit); the **fabric-keeper** janitor owns time semantics
+    (leases, deadlines, dead-letter, digests) and neither assigns nor triggers.
 17. Personas/Cards live in git, deployed — never edited live.
 18. Backbone/routing changes gated by golden-set shadow eval (Langfuse).
 19. Fabric hygiene: creation quotas, ancestry depth cap, cycle detection,
@@ -381,3 +406,6 @@ Added in v2.1 (hardening review, same day):
     reranker); pre-load checks.
 21. Transport: sync = direct A2A RPC (journaled); async = KB polling; polling
     never on a sync path.
+22. **Missed crons are not a keeper duty**: schedules that must not be missed
+    are monitored in **Zabbix**; faults are incidents handled **per problem
+    class** by a future **ops-agent** (§6d), never by a blanket catch-up policy.