Find the Retry Loop Burning Your AI Agent Budget with Tracing | Splunk Agent Observability

One of the most expensive failure modes in AI agents is a silent retry loop. An agent hits a rate limit, blindly retries until it succeeds, the user gets a response, and no ticket ever gets filed. Under the hood, tokens are burning, latency is compounding, and a transient error today becomes a sustained outage tomorrow.

In this walkthrough, we run a Multi-Agent Stock Analysis app: a Growth Analyst building the bull case and a Risk Analyst building the bear case, converging on a consensus score, and show how Splunk Agent Observability surfaces a fragile retry pattern that's invisible from the outside.

You'll see:

• A healthy baseline run analyzing Apple stock across bull/bear agents
• The same request with a flaky tool call, output still looks perfect, user never notices
• The Agent Stream flagging a spike in Tool Error Rate on the second trace
• The trace view isolates two failed tool calls before a successful retry
• Root cause identified in seconds: fragile retry logic in the get_stock_info tool call not the analysts, not the consensus logic
• Why retry patterns without circuit breakers or timeout guards are a ticking cost-and-latency bomb

Splunk Agent Observability collapses hours of log-diving into span-level visibility in seconds.
Try Splunk Agent Observability: https://www.splunk.com/en_us/download/observability-cloud-free-edition.html
Docs: https://agent-observability-docs.splunk.com/what-is-splunk-agent-observability

0:00 The hidden cost of silent retry loops

0:23 Meet the app: Growth Analyst + Risk Analyst consensus pipeline

0:38 Healthy baseline run — analyzing Apple stock

0:51 Same request, flaky tool call — user sees no difference

1:10 Why silent failures never get a ticket

1:25 Agent Stream: clean trace vs. problem trace

1:30 Tool Error Rate spikes on the second run

1:42 Trace view: two failed tool calls before success

1:53 Why "just two retries" is the real red flag

2:08 Root cause isolated to the get_stock_info tool call

2:20 From hours of log-diving to seconds of span-level visibility