Your Agents Need Observability Before They Need Better Models

Everyone's chasing faster models, better reasoning, shinier inference endpoints. But here's the truth: your agent will fail in production long before model quality becomes your bottleneck. The problem isn't the model. It's that you can't see what your agent is actually doing. In this session we cover why traditional observability breaks for agent workloads, how OpenTelemetry and GenAI semantic conventions give you the vocabulary to instrument agents correctly, and how observability becomes the thing that lets you gradually trust your agents with more autonomy. You'll walk away knowing what to instrument, why it matters, and how to stop guessing when your agent does something unexpected in production.