I Built 15 SLOs for an AI Agent. Here's What OpenTelemetry Could Measure
The author developed fifteen service-level objectives to evaluate the reliability of an AI agent beyond standard metrics like latency. These indicators focus on operational concerns such as task completion accuracy and tool functionality. The article examines which of these signals can be captured by OpenTelemetry out of the box versus those requiring custom instrumentation.
- ▪The author defined fifteen indicators to measure specific reliability aspects of an AI agent.
- ▪The metrics focus on whether tasks finished correctly and if the agent's working memory remained accurate.
- ▪Tool calls and model calls are treated as requests where failures can trigger alerts.
- ▪The analysis compares OpenTelemetry's default capabilities with the need for custom instrumentation.
- ▪The indicators are structured as ratios of good events to valid events.
Hacker News (AI / LLM) files mainly under ai. We currently carry 4,706 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
inspect →
Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Medium |
| Canonical URL | https://medium.com/data-science-collective/i-built-15-slos-for-an-ai-agent-heres-what-opentelemetry-could-measure-dcbacf4c3e9e |
| Publication time | Sun, 13 Sep 2026 20:24:56 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-13T20:41:52.079Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-13T20:41:52.079Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | inbixaxDMP40 · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Member-only storyAIData ScienceGenaiAgentsProgrammingI Built 15 SLOs for an AI Agent. Here’s What OpenTelemetry Could MeasureA hands-on look at what OpenTelemetry captures out of the box and the reliability signals you still need to instrument yourself.Tanmay Deshpande8 min read·4 days ago--3ListenSharePress enter or click to view image in full sizeSource — AI generated Image by AuthorIf you are not a Medium member, you can read the story for free using this friend link.I wanted to build service-level objectives for an agent.Here's the agent's architecture.Press enter or click to view image in full sizeSource — Image by AuthorNot just the usual dashboard of token counts and p95 latency.
…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Medium.
Discussion
0 commentsMore from Medium
