--- title: "How agent o11y differs from traditional o11y — Phil Hetzel, Braintrust" url: https://daily.dev/posts/how-agent-o11y-differs-from-traditional-o11y-phil-hetzel-braintrust-1qpagjdwf source_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XBaznoTRDFI type: video:youtube source: "AI Engineer" published: 2026-05-28T23:22:42.742Z updated: 2026-05-28T23:28:15.215Z tags: ["llm", "ai-agents", "observability"] reading_time: 20 upvotes: 2 comments: 0 language: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # How agent o11y differs from traditional o11y — Phil Hetzel, Braintrust **[AI Engineer](https://daily.dev/sources/aidotengineer)** · 20 min read · 2 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary A conference talk by Phil Hetzel from Braintrust comparing traditional observability (uptime, latency, error rates) with agent observability for AI systems. Key differences covered: agents are non-deterministic unlike traditional apps, agent traces are semi-structured, voluminous (up to gigabytes), and contain unstructured text requiring full-text indexing. Agent o11y also requires qualitative metrics like groundedness, tool usage correctness, and brand alignment. The talk highlights that agent observability involves non-technical domain experts (clinicians, lawyers) reviewing traces, unlike traditional o11y. Braintrust built a custom database (moving away from ClickHouse) to handle these workloads, incorporating write-ahead logs, analytical indexes, and Tantivy (a Rust-based Lucene-like full-text index). The future direction includes LLM-powered topic modeling and sentiment analysis over traces to shorten the production-to-fix iteration loop. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [Agent Observability Powers Agent Evaluation](https://daily.dev/posts/agent-observability-powers-agent-evaluation-zmcjiu8ai) · LangChain · 34 upvotes · 1 comments - [AI Agent Observability 2026: Debug Production Agents](https://daily.dev/posts/ai-agent-observability-2026-debug-production-agents-sxo8wyw1v) · Alex CloudStar · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [Why Your AI Agent is a Black Box and How to fix it With OpenTelemetry](https://daily.dev/posts/why-your-ai-agent-is-a-black-box-and-how-to-fix-it-with-opentelemetry-oakutrahj) · DevOps.com · 0 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#llm](https://daily.dev/tags/llm), [#ai-agents](https://daily.dev/tags/ai-agents), [#observability](https://daily.dev/tags/observability) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/how-agent-o11y-differs-from-traditional-o11y-phil-hetzel-braintrust-1qpagjdwf)