Radical Geek field guide
Radical Geek's Guide to Agentic Observability
A practical playbook for joining agent runs to machine consumption, human intervention, evidence, cost and accountable outcomes.
Why this guide
Agentic observability records enough structured evidence to operate and improve agentic work while protecting sensitive code, secrets, customer data and private reasoning.
This playbook owns the evidence layer across the guide system: event identity, the work-item ledger, telemetry, attribution, dashboards, alerts, incident evidence and operational learning.
It connects model and tool activity to verification, human decisions, full cost and accepted outcomes so teams can diagnose failures, qualify routes, govern delegation and improve the delivery system.
Capture an append-only evidence trail from work item to accepted outcome without turning telemetry into a data leak.
What you will leave with
A guide built to be used.
- 01
Create stable identities for work items, runs, model calls, tool calls, checks and human decisions.
- 02
Build an append-only work-item ledger from intent through execution, verification and accepted outcome.
- 03
Join model routes, tokens, latency, cost, fallback, human effort and operational results.
- 04
Capture useful evidence while protecting code, secrets, customer data and private reasoning.
- 05
Operate dashboards, alerts, runbooks and incident reviews that improve the agentic system.
Inside the guide
The working ground it covers.
- What makes agents observable
- Events, logs, metrics and traces
- The minimum telemetry schema and work-item ledger
- Router, local inference and workflow-pattern observability
- Quality, cost and outcome signals
- Privacy-safe logging, dashboards and alerts
- Incident review and the first 30 days