By heissanjay · Published 12/9/2025

Observability for LLM Systems

Practical telemetry patterns for tracing retrieval, prompts, and model outputs end to end.

1 min read

Good observability turns debugging from guesswork into routine engineering.

Core telemetry layers

Request traces with correlation IDs
Retrieval diagnostics and ranking scores
Prompt and completion metadata
Token, latency, and cost breakdowns

If you cannot explain a bad answer from telemetry, your system is not production-ready.

Example trace payload

{
  "request_id": "req_9f3e",
  "retrieval_latency_ms": 37,
  "model_latency_ms": 812,
  "total_tokens": 1924,
  "guardrails": ["pii_filter", "safety_classifier"]
}