Agentic System Cost and Latency Instrumentation System

An Agentic System Cost and Latency Instrumentation System is an observability system that measures time-to-first-token, total latency, and operational cost for agentic system performance monitoring.

• AKA: Agent Performance Instrumentation, AI System Cost Monitoring, Latency Tracking System, Agent Metrics Collection System.
• Context:
  • It can typically track time-to-first-token (TTFT) for streaming response systems with millisecond precision.
  • It can typically measure end-to-end latency including retrieval time, processing duration, and generation delay.
  • It can typically calculate cost per task based on token consumption, API calls, and compute resource usage.
  • It can often provide real-time dashboards with performance visualization and anomaly detection.
  • It can often support cost attribution across user segments, feature types, and deployment regions.
  • It can often enable performance optimization through bottleneck identification and resource allocation tuning.
  • It can range from being a Basic Instrumentation System to being a Comprehensive Instrumentation System, depending on its metric coverage.
  • It can range from being a Passive Monitoring System to being an Active Instrumentation System, depending on its data collection method.
  • It can range from being a Sampled Instrumentation System to being a Full Instrumentation System, depending on its collection rate.
  • It can range from being a Single-Service System to being a Distributed Tracing System, depending on its architectural scope.
  • ...
• Examples:
  • LLM Cost Instrumentation Systems, such as:
    • Token Usage Monitor tracking prompt tokens and completion tokens.
    • Model Routing Cost Tracker measuring inference endpoint expenses.
  • RAG System Instrumentations, such as:
    • Retrieval Latency Monitor measuring vector search time and reranking duration.
    • Document Processing Cost Tracker calculating embedding generation expense.
  • Multi-Agent Instrumentation Systems, such as:
    • Agent Coordination Overhead Monitor tracking message passing latency.
    • Collective Decision Cost Analyzer measuring consensus protocol expense.
  • ...
• Counter-Examples:
  • Functional Monitoring System, which tracks correctness rather than performance metrics.
  • Security Monitoring System, which focuses on threat detection rather than cost efficiency.
  • Manual Performance Review, which lacks automated instrumentation.
• See: Observability System, Performance Monitoring, Cost Management System, Latency Measurement, Agentic System Progression Testing Task, APM System, Distributed Tracing.

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