Demystifying LLM Observability
LLM Observability: How to Monitor What Your AI Is Actually Doing. The “Black Box” Problem You’ve deployed an LLM-powered app. It’s answering tickets, summarizing documents, or generating code. But when it goes wrong—hallucinates, leaks context, or slows down—can you explain why ? Traditional monitoring (CPU, memory, latency) won’t cut it. You need LLM observability : tracing, evaluating, and understanding actual model behavior in production. 3 Layers of LLM Observability 1. Traces: Replay the Conversation Every interaction is a chain: user prompt → retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) lookup → LLM call → post-processing → response. A trace captures each step’s input, output, token usage, and latency. 2. Metrics: Count What Matters Token velocity (speed of generation) First token latency Hallucination score (using an evaluator LLM) Grounding score (retrieved docs vs. answer) 3. Evaluations: Automated Judgement ...