Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

If you’re like everyone else who works in software development, it’s a good bet that almost every single thing that you thought you knew about your business and engineering has changed as a result of the advent of modern LLMs. How should you respond to these changes? How should you change how you and your team develop software?

OrionIQ is Logz.io’s new agentic observability platform designed to move teams from detecting issues to resolving them automatically. As AI accelerates software development, operations remain manual: engineers still wake up at 2 a.m. to investigate alerts and rebuild context. OrionIQ uses AI agents to analyze real-time telemetry, investigate incidents, identify root causes, and take action across systems.

Most "agent observability best practices" content reads like a compliance checklist from 2019 with "AI" pasted over "microservices." Implement comprehensive logging. Establish evaluation metrics. Create governance frameworks. Not a single line of code. No mention of what happens when your agent silently picks the wrong tool on turn 3 and you need to figure out why.

This guest blog post is by Tohn Furutani, SRE Engineer at NTT DATA. Over the past year, the conversation around generative AI has shifted from single-shot use cases—such as summarization, Q&A, and chat interfaces—to agentic AI systems that can make decisions based on context, plan multistep actions, invoke tools, and adapt as conditions change.

Teams running LLM applications in production face a cost problem that traditional APM tools were never designed to solve. CPU and memory costs are relatively predictable — a web service processing 1,000 requests per second costs roughly the same week over week. LLM API costs are not. A single user session can cost $0.01 or $5 depending on prompt length, model choice, conversation history, and how many retries happen inside your chain.

Continuous monitoring tools track system health, performance, and behavior in real time across production environments. For a deeper understanding of how this fits into modern DevOps practices, see this guide on continuous monitoring and its impact on DevOps. They collect logs, metrics, and distributed traces across the infrastructure and application layers, giving engineering teams visibility into how their systems are running, where anomalies occur, and when something needs immediate attention.

The agent era is here. Engineering teams are shipping AI-powered products, deploying multi-agent systems, and trying to figure out what observability even means for non-deterministic systems.

In our previous post in our series on observability for the agent era, we looked at how Honeycomb provides unique visibility into LLMs operating in your production environment. Now, let’s flip it around and explore how Honeycomb provides observability insights uniquely suited to helping your AI agents rapidly diagnose and fix production issues, and build production feedback into the next round of development.

The previous two posts in this series have looked at some of the use cases Honeycomb customers are implementing to observe LLMs in production and power agentic observability workflows. In this third and final post, we’ll take it back to basics and look at how the fundamental capabilities and infrastructure of Honeycomb provide the comprehensive data and fast performance that makes these use cases work at production scale. AI capabilities built on a weak observability foundation fall apart fast.

Sometimes the hardest part of debugging a system isn’t fixing the problem—it’s figuring out what’s actually happening in the first place.