ai / llm-observability-cost-control

LLM Observability and Cost Control

Know what your AI is doing and what it costs. We set up tracing, evaluations and token cost tracking with LangSmith and Langfuse, so you can debug bad answers, catch regressions and keep spend predictable.

agent · live

Why did our AI bill jump this week?

langfuse.costs({ groupBy: "feature", range: "7d" })✓
langfuse.traces({ feature: "summarize", sort: "tokens" })✓ 20 traces

78% of the increase came from "summarize". A prompt change on Tuesday started sending full threads instead of the last 20 messages.

Ask a follow-up…
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AI in Production Is a Black Box Without This

When an answer is wrong or the bill spikes, most teams have no record of what the model saw, what it did, or why.

Users report bad answers, and nobody can reproduce them
A prompt tweak quietly makes another case worse
Token spend grows with no breakdown by feature or customer
No way to compare models or prompts with real data
capabilities

What Observability Gives You

The same discipline you apply to the rest of production, applied to AI

Full Traces

See every prompt, retrieval, tool call and response for any request.

Evals

Test prompt and model changes against real cases before they ship.

Cost Breakdown

Token usage and spend by feature, model and customer.

Alerts

Get notified about error spikes, slow responses and runaway spend.

graph

How We Set It Up

  1. node: instrument

    Instrument

    Trace Everything That Matters

    We add tracing to your LLM calls, agents and RAG pipelines, tagged with feature, user and version.

    • LangSmith or Langfuse integration
    • Traces across agents, tools and retrieval
    • Metadata for feature, user and release
    • PII redaction where needed
  2. node: evaluate

    Evaluate

    Catch Regressions Early

    We build datasets from real traffic and run evals on every prompt or model change, with automated and human scoring.

    • Datasets from production traces
    • LLM-as-judge and rule-based checks
    • Human review queues
    • Evals wired into CI
  3. node: control_cost

    Control Cost

    Spend You Can Predict

    Dashboards and budgets per feature, plus the fixes that usually matter most: smaller models where they suffice, caching and tighter context.

    • Token and cost dashboards
    • Budgets and spend alerts
    • Prompt and context trimming
    • Caching and model routing
tools

Tooling

Open and managed options, set up to fit your stack

"name": "LangSmith",
"description": Tracing, datasets and evals, tightly integrated with LangChain and LangGraph.
"name": "Langfuse",
"description": Open-source tracing, evals and cost analytics that you can self-host on AWS.
"name": "Token and Cost Tracking",
"description": Per-request token counts rolled up by feature, model and customer.
"name": "CI Evals",
"description": GitHub Actions jobs that block merges when quality drops.
"name": "Dashboards and Alerts",
"description": Spend, latency and error views with notifications to your team.
"name": "Model Routing",
"description": Send each request to the cheapest model that meets the quality bar.
trace

Getting Visibility in Weeks

  1. 01 Baseline

    Inventory your LLM calls, models and current spend.

  2. 02 Instrument

    Add tracing and metadata to every call path.

  3. 03 Dashboards

    Stand up cost, latency and quality views.

  4. 04 Eval Datasets

    Build test sets from real production traces.

  5. 05 CI Gates

    Run evals automatically on prompt and model changes.

  6. 06 Optimize

    Apply routing, caching and prompt fixes, then measure the savings.

evals

What You Get

Included in every observability setup

PASS
Every
Request Traced
from prompt to final answer
PASS
Per-feature
Cost Reports
tokens and spend you can act on
PASS
Gated
Releases
evals run before changes ship
PASS
Alerted
Anomalies
errors, latency and spend spikes

Ready to See Inside Your AI?

Tell us how your AI features run today. We will set up tracing, evals and cost tracking so you can improve them with confidence.

Describe the task you want AI to take off your plate…Set Up Observability