Observability in Production: Watching Agents at Scale

You cannot read ten thousand traces a day. Learn the three signals a production agent must emit, how to alert on distributions instead of single runs, what the observability platforms actually do as of September 2026, how online evaluation catches drift you never deployed — and the five charts an agent team really looks at.

Content current as of 2026-09.

Lessons

1. Three signals: notice, explain, prove
2. Alerting on distributions, not single runs
3. The tooling survey — and the portability layer under it
4. Online evaluation and the drift you never deployed
5. The five charts an agent team actually looks at