AI Agent Observability and Cost Attribution

[jasendo]

Cost attribution gets even worse when you factor in the bad decisions. Retries, abandoned tool calls, and cascading failures that still hit your bill but never show up in traces.

[deborahjacob]

I’m building an OTel-based SDK that wraps the billable edges (entrypoint, LLM/tool clients, async publish/consume) and emits both traces for debugging and a lightweight event ledger for run/attempt lifecycle and call boundaries. I define the workflow + possible outcomes up front, then attribute all runs and attempts to the final outcome event to get the cost per outcome

[deborahjacob]

What’s your approach to end-to-end AI cost attribution (model + infra + data) for agents in production?