Agent Observability Without Logging Chain-of-Thought
When an agent fails, the first request from an engineer is often:
Show me what it was thinking.
That request confuses two different needs.
Researchers may study model reasoning. Operators need to know which version ran, what state it saw, which evidence it used, what action it proposed, why policy allowed or denied it, what the tool actually did, how much budget remained, and why the run ended.
Logging hidden chain-of-thought does not reliably answer those questions. It can expose sensitive data, create a false sense of explanation, and still omit the deterministic code path that produced the external effect.
Agent observability should explain execution, not attempt to read a mind.
Start With Three Different Records
Do not use one giant “agent log.”
Trace
A trace connects operations with duration:
- model calls;
- retrieval;
- policy checks;
- tool calls;
- approvals;
- checkpoint reads and writes.
Events
Events record point-in-time state changes:
RUN_ADMITTEDMODEL_PROPOSED_TOOLPOLICY_DENIEDTOOL_STARTEDTOOL_RECEIPT_RECORDEDAPPROVAL_GRANTEDCHECKPOINT_WRITTENRUN_COMPLETED
OpenTelemetry's...
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