observability
Observability is the ability to understand what is happening inside a system from outputs such as logs, metrics, and traces.
Observability is the property of a software system that lets engineers understand its internal state and behavior through the logs, metrics, and traces it emits. Unlike monitoring, which checks whether predefined metrics stay within normal ranges, observability focuses on making it possible to trace the causes of unexpected problems.
In AI, the term refers to recording the prompts, model responses, tool calls, token usage, latency, and cost of applications built on large language models and of AI agents, and to evaluating the quality of their responses.
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Articles covering this entry
Arize AI, a company that builds observability and evaluation tools for AI applications, uses this example to sketch where agent debugging is heading: away from…
Set up observability that answers the basic questions: what the agent did, what path it took and whether it stayed faithful to the task.
…that fewer than one in 10 enterprise AI applications had full end-to-end observability, while a March 2026 survey found that 77% of IT organizations lacked full…
The design aims to reduce observability costs without giving up the information engineers need to understand incidents, while keeping proposed changes subject t…