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Overview

Why Observability?

Observability is the practice of monitoring and understanding the behavior of your LLM application. With Agenta, you can add a few lines of code to start tracking all inputs, outputs, and metadata of your application. This allows you to:

  • Debug Effectively: View exact prompts sent and contexts retrieved. For complex workflows like agents, you can trace the data flow and quickly identify root causes.
  • Bootstrap Test Sets: Track real-world inputs and outputs and use them to bootstrap test sets in which you can continuously iterate.
  • Find Edge Cases: Identify latency spikes and cost increases. Understand performance bottlenecks to optimize your app's speed and cost-effectiveness.
  • Track Costs and Latency Over Time: Monitor how your app's expenses and response times change.
  • Compare App Versions: Compare the behavior in productions of different versions of your application to see which performs better.

Observability in Agenta

Agenta's observability features are built on OpenTelemetry (OTel), an open-source standard for application observability. This provides several advantages:

  • Wide Library Support: Use many supported libraries right out of the box.
  • Vendor Neutrality: Send your traces to platforms like New Relic or Datadog without code changes. Switch vendors at will.
  • Proven Reliability: Use a mature and actively maintained SDK that's trusted in the industry.
  • Ease of Integration: If you're familiar with OTel, you already know how to instrument your app with Agenta. No new concepts or syntax to learn—Agenta uses familiar OTel concepts like traces and spans.

Key Concepts

Traces: A trace represents the complete journey of a request through your application. In our context, a trace corresponds to a single request to your LLM application.

Spans: A span is a unit of work within a trace. Spans can be nested, forming a tree-like structure. The root span represents the overall operation, while child spans represent sub-operations. Agenta enriches each span with cost information and metadata when you make LLM calls.

Next Steps

Integrations