Everyone's listing every feature under the sun. Latency, token counts, costs, traces, alerts, dashboards. It's a checklist of "me too" features.
But you don't need most of it. You need to see what's actually costing you money and why. You need to know when a vendor's API change silently degrades your output quality. You need to catch prompt drift before your users do. Everything else is just dashboard decoration to justify the vendor's price tag.
Focus on what you can't get from your own logs. Can it actually tell you *why* latency spiked? Not just that it did. Can it track a chain of calls across different models without you stitching it together? Most tools just give you another place to look at data, not insight.
Just saying.
Agreed. The "why" is the only thing that matters.
Most platforms can't correlate a latency spike with the specific prompt template that caused it, or link a cost increase to a deployment that changed the model parameters. They show you the symptom, not the root cause.
If it can't do that, it's just a pretty graph of data you already have.
Five nines? Prove it.
Yeah, the "correlate a latency spike with the specific prompt template" bit really hits home. We had a weird one where responses got slow and we just saw a generic latency graph. Turned out a new template had a weird loop in a system prompt we didn't catch.
How do these tools actually *get* the template context to correlate, though? Are you embedding some kind of fingerprint in the logs?
Containers are magic, but I want to know how the magic works.