# Observability & FinOps

Author: Murali Sid (https://linkedin.com/in/muralisid)
Source: https://www.agenticarchitectureskills.com/library/layers/r12-observability-and-finops
Published: 2026-09-18
Updated: 2026-09-18
Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
Cite as: Murali Sid. Observability & FinOps. Agentic Architecture Skills. https://www.agenticarchitectureskills.com/library/layers/r12-observability-and-finops

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Status: complete (published 2026-08-19). Scope finalized at Batch B kickoff with maintainer POV; see findings.md and sources.md.

## Scope inventory (v0) [#scope-inventory-v0]

* **Telemetry**: OTel GenAI spans for model, tool, and memory, session replay and trace inspection, stable workload IDs
* **Quality in production**: groundedness drift monitoring, sampled in-production evals, SLOs (latency, success rate, containment), runaway-loop anomaly detection, alerting and paging
* **Cost**: token accounting, per-task and per-outcome unit economics, showback and chargeback, budget caps and alerts, cache effectiveness, capacity forecasting
* **Two-estate visibility**: pulling telemetry and audit out of licensed platforms into one view; value metrics (time saved, containment, throughput) proving ROI; supervisor dashboards (the factory-floor view)

## Challenged-default candidates [#challenged-default-candidates]

LLM observability products vs OTel-native extension of existing APM; per-agent cost dashboards vs per-outcome unit economics. Each track proposes its final list at kickoff.

## Files [#files]

`findings.md` and `sources.md` carry this track's research. The scoping brief and the vendor map were archived on 2026-08-23 (see `archive/`, decision D038).