Telemetry Contract Across Model, Retrieval, and Tools
Understand how to design and implement telemetry contracts that specify request trace structures and span attributes crucial for monitoring and auditing generative AI services. Explore the use of OpenTelemetry vocabulary to enable cross-team compatibility, support incident analysis, and maintain privacy while capturing essential evidence for quality and latency control in regulated enterprise AI systems.
The evaluation specification named the telemetry fields needed to verify a release decision. It did not define the structure of a request trace or which telemetry must be captured to produce that evidence. A telemetry contract defines the observability requirements needed to operate a probabilistic GenAI service. It specifies the structure of a request trace, which spans must be recorded for model routing, retrieval, and tool execution, and which correlation identifiers must propagate across those spans and downstream systems. This enables teams to investigate quality shifts, latency regressions, and safety incidents and reconstruct the relevant request path. Without this contract, a team can still collect logs and metrics, but it may be unable to reconstruct what happened during a specific user request when the outcome depends on model routing, retrieval variability, and tool side effects within the same request.
For the regulated-enterprise internal assistant, the systems and controls that depend on telemetry are already defined: the quality SLO gates and the model-routing policy. The telemetry ...