Observability goes beyond monitoring. Monitoring tells you a metric went up or down. Observability lets you understand why — tracing a specific interaction, seeing what data the agent retrieved, what model was called, what decision was made, and where something went wrong.
A procurement agent that escalated a request that should have been auto-approved can be diagnosed through observability: the team traces the interaction, finds the agent retrieved an outdated policy document due to a chunking issue, and fixes the knowledge base before redeploying. Without observability, debugging AI systems in production is guesswork.
