Observability Is The Missing Agent Layer

# Observability Is The Missing Agent Layer

Most teams ship agent workflows before they ship the tools needed to understand them.

You can usually find prompts, model outputs, and raw logs. What is missing is the connective tissue between them: the execution story. Which action fired first, what data it read, which tool it touched, which retry path triggered, and what the operator finally had to repair by hand.

## Why logs are insufficient

Logs tell you that events happened. They do not necessarily tell you which workflow state those events belonged to or whether they were expected. This is the difference between noise and diagnostic evidence.

## What to instrument

- workflow id and step id
- actor identity: model, automation, or human
- tool inputs and summarized outputs
- retry count and escalation reason
- terminal status with a plain-language cause

## The operational payoff

Once this is visible, the conversation changes. Teams stop blaming the model as a monolith and start seeing concrete failure modes: stale context, broken assumptions, weak retry conditions, ambiguous review ownership.

## The actual missing layer

Observability is not a bonus capability. For agentic systems, it is the layer that turns “AI did something weird” into a fixable engineering problem.