AI service operations
AI Observability Platform Selection Guide
Select telemetry standards and products from the decisions operators must make, while minimizing sensitive-content collection and vendor lock-in.
- Format
- Decision Path
- Level
- Advanced
- Audience
- Developer, Operator, Leader
- Owner
- Project42 Editorial
- Review cadence
- Every 60 days
- Prerequisites
- Service objectives, critical user journeys, and incident questions; A data classification and telemetry retention policy; An inventory of model, retrieval, tool, gateway, and application boundaries
Start with decisions and evidence, not a dashboard
List the questions needed for release, cost, reliability, security, privacy, quality, and incident decisions. Define a trace that correlates application, retrieval, model, gateway, tool, approval, handoff, evaluation, and terminal postcondition without requiring raw sensitive content.
Use stable semantic conventions and your own version identifiers where possible. Product-native traces can add valuable detail, but an exportable core reduces lock-in and preserves cross-provider investigation.
Evaluate coverage, governance, and failure behavior
Compare ingestion formats, trace linkage, streaming and tool coverage, evaluation integration, sampling, redaction, encryption, tenant isolation, region, retention, export, deletion, alerting, access control, cost, scale, availability, and incident workflow.
Test missing, delayed, duplicated, and malformed telemetry. The application must fail safely when the observability platform is unavailable; tracing should not become a required path for inference unless that dependency is explicit and engineered.
Task: [OBSERVABILITY DECISION AND OPERATING OUTCOMES]
Scope: [APPLICATION, MODELS, RETRIEVAL, TOOLS, GATEWAYS, USERS, AND REGIONS]
Permissions: [TELEMETRY PRODUCERS, READERS, ADMINS, EXPORT, AND DELETION]
Decision questions: [RELEASE, QUALITY, SAFETY, RELIABILITY, COST, AND INCIDENT]
Signal contract: [TRACE/SPAN IDS, VERSIONS, EVENTS, METRICS, LOGS, AND POSTCONDITIONS]
Data policy: [ALLOWLIST, REDACTION, SAMPLING, REGION, RETENTION, AND DELETION]
Platform evidence: [COVERAGE, EXPORT, SCALE, AVAILABILITY, COST, AND LOCK-IN]
Stop conditions: [CONTENT LEAK, BROKEN TENANT ISOLATION, MISSING CRITICAL LINK, OR BLOCKING OUTAGE]
Verification: [END-TO-END TRACE, ACCESS TEST, REDACTION TEST, EXPORT, AND FAILURE TEST]
Recovery: [DISABLE SENSITIVE SIGNAL, FAIL OPEN/CLOSED AS DESIGNED, EXPORT, AND RESTORE]Expected evidence and verification
Expected evidence includes decision questions, signal and data contracts, end-to-end trace coverage, access and tenant tests, redaction fixtures, sampling and retention behavior, export, alert precision, volume and cost, failure-mode behavior, owner, and exit plan.
Stop collection when protected content or credentials appear, tenant separation fails, or retention and deletion cannot be enforced. Disable the affected signal, restrict access, preserve a minimal incident record, remove exposed data under policy, rotate credentials if needed, and restore collection only after regression tests pass.