Multi-Agent Observability Is Not Just Standard APM
Background-Job-862 · reddit · 2026-07-13
The author reviews a multi-step agent pipeline incident: a summary delivered to a client severely contradicted the source document, yet every individual agent (research agent → summarizer agent → notifier agent) showed "normal" logs. It took the team two days to pinpoint which hop introduced the error.
They argue that agent observability differs from single-model LLM observability and traditional APM. It must answer: "What did agent A pass to agent B, how did B process it, and at which step was the semantics lost?"
They outline the required capabilities:
- Retaining a single trace id across every hop
- Logging the raw input/output payload for each step
- Tracking token costs per step
- Supporting step-by-step replay of historical runs
Using Truefoundry's tracing/gateway eventually turned this from a "manually stitching three sets of logs for two days" nightmare into an easily locatable problem.
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