LLM observability

LLM and Agentic Observability

Answer questions about monitoring LLMs and agentic components using data actually ingested into Elastic — nothing else. The four questions this skill answers are LLM performance, cost and token utilization, response quality, and call chaining or agentic workflow orchestration.

A given deployment typically uses one or more ingestion paths: APM/OTLP traces, and/or integration metrics and logs.

Which one exists is a discovery result, not an assumption — never assume both are present. For ES|QL syntax, commands, and query patterns, use the elasticsearch-esql skill. For service-level latency and error triage that is not LLM-specific, use the observability-sre-triage skill.

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Environment Configuration

This skill executes Elasticsearch operations through the elastic CLI. If the `elastic` CLI is not installed, tell the user what it is needed for. Do not guess credentials, call the HTTP API directly, or attempt other workarounds.

This skill references operations in HTTP-shorthand form (e.g., GET /, GET /_cat/indices, GET /{index}/_mapping, GET /{index}/_settings/index.mode, POST /_query). The Operations table at the end of this document maps each shorthand to the equivalent elastic CLI command — always use the CLI rather than calling the HTTP API directly.

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Analysis without cluster access

The CLI check above gates querying the cluster — it does not gate analysis. When the user has already supplied the evidence in their question (metric values, counts, status reasons, log lines, alert payloads, configuration), reason from that evidence and deliver the conclusion.

When you genuinely do need data the user has not provided, still say what you would check and how — name the specific query, index, and field that would settle the question — and then ask for CLI setup. An answer that names the check is useful without a cluster; one that only asks for setup is not.

Jobs to be done

• Discover which LLM ingestion path a deployment actually uses before querying anything
• Discover the real LLM field names in this deployment, because GenAI attribute naming is not consistent
• Report LLM latency, throughput, and error rate by model, service, or time
• Report token utilization, and report cost only when a cost field genuinely exists
• Investigate response quality: failures, timeouts, finish reasons, content filters, and guardrail events
• Reconstruct agentic call chains and find the bottleneck span in a multi-step workflow
• Correlate findings with SLOs and alerting rules defined on LLM-related data

Output discipline

Applies to every response produced under this skill.

• Commit to the best-supported conclusion. When the evidence points one way, say so. Do not downgrade confidence to sound cautious — hedging on unambiguous evidence is a defect, not humility.
• State confidence once, in the conclusion. Do not restate it per bullet.
• Do not speculate past the evidence. If a cause was not observed, it does not go in the answer. Say what is unknown and stop.
• Report absence as absence. Zero rows means the data is missing or not collected; it never means the underlying condition is healthy. In particular, if no cost field exists, say cost is not instrumented — do not multiply token counts by a guessed per-token price and present the product as a cost figure.
• Report the numbers actually found. Quote the token counts, latencies, and error rates the query returned. Do not round them into vague characterizations, and do not carry forward a number from an example in this skill.
• Do not pad. No restating the question, no narrating which queries were run unless the result mattered, no summarizing the summary.
• End on the finding. No trailing offers such as "want me to dig deeper?". Actionable follow-ups belong in a recommendations list, phrased as recommendations, not as questions.

Where the data lives

Use the generic traces-* pattern to find trace data regardless of whether an Elastic APM agent or OpenTelemetry collected it. Instrumentation can come from EDOT, OpenLLMetry, OpenLIT, or Langtrace exporting to OTLP — all of them land LLM and agent spans in the trace data streams.

Only traces can reconstruct a call chain. trace.id, span.id, and parent.id are the only way to rebuild an agentic call chain. Integration metrics are pre-aggregated and cannot do it — if the question is about orchestration and only integration metrics exist, say the chain cannot be reconstructed from the available data.

Background reading: LLM and agentic AI observability, EDOT LLM use cases, Observability Labs — LLM Observability.

Process: determine what data is available

Run these in order. Do not skip to step 5.

1. Verify the connection and detect the version. Call GET /. The decision this drives is which query language surface is available: build_flavor: "serverless" means all ES|QL features including TS, TRANGE, and TBUCKET are available. Otherwise use version.number: on Stack, TS is preview in 9.2 and GA in 9.4, and TRANGE is GA in 9.3.0, so treat Stack 9.4 as the floor for the whole time-series path and fall back to FROM with BUCKET(@timestamp, ...) below it. Getting this wrong produces a query that fails to parse.

1. Determine which ingestion paths exist. The decision is whether this deployment has traces, integration data, or both — and it changes which questions are answerable at all. List data streams with GET /_data_stream/<name> (pass traces-*, metrics-*, logs-*) or resolve patterns with GET /_resolve/index/<pattern>. Look for trace data streams, metrics-apm*, and any metrics-* or logs-* matching a known LLM integration dataset. If neither path has LLM data, say so and stop — do not answer from general knowledge about the model provider.

1. Discover the real LLM field names. The decision is which exact field paths to write into ES|QL, and it cannot be guessed. Naming differs across instrumentations: gen_ai.* versus llm.* versus integration-specific names, and the semantic conventions themselves have shifted (older instrumentation emits gen_ai.system, newer emits gen_ai.provider.name). Use GET /_field_caps with a field pattern such as *gen_ai*, *llm*, *token*, *cost*, or read GET /<index>/_mapping, then sample a document to confirm the values are populated. Attribute nesting differs by ingestion path — OTel-native trace data streams expose span attributes as attributes.<name> (and often as a bare passthrough <name>), not as span.attributes.<name>. Confirm which form resolves before writing a query. See references/genai-fields.md for the attribute catalog and the resolution rules.

1. Decide whether a cost field exists. Cost is not part of the OpenTelemetry GenAI specification. Some instrumentations add a custom attribute such as llm.response.cost.usd_estimate, and some integrations expose a cost metric, but many deployments have neither. Look for it explicitly in step 3. If it is absent, the answer to a cost question is that cost is not instrumented — report token counts instead and name the gap.

1. Choose ONE consistent source per question. When both APM traces and integration metrics exist, pick one and use it for the whole answer. Mixing them double-counts and produces two different numbers for the same quantity, because the integration polls the provider's own accounting while the traces record what the client observed. Route by question type: traces for per-request analysis, call chains, and anything needing a trace hierarchy; integration metrics for aggregate token and cost totals over long windows. State which source the answer came from.

1. Check alerts and SLOs when relevance is plausible. The decision is whether a degradation is already known and tracked. Find rules with GET kbn:/api/alerting/rules/_find and SLOs with GET kbn:/api/observability/slos, then filter to those targeting LLM-related services or integration metrics — the field names from step 3 tell you which rules are related. Firing alerts, or SLOs in violated or degrading status, are evidence of degraded performance. Note that the SLO API's sli.kql.custom indicator takes KQL rather than ES|QL; that is an API contract, not a recommendation to use KQL elsewhere.

Use cases and query patterns

Write queries with POST /_query. Always bound the time range, add service.name when present, and LIMIT results. Use coarse buckets when only a trend is needed rather than scanning a wide window at fine granularity.

On the trace path, per-span latency comes from duration (nanoseconds, populated on every OTel-native span) or span.duration.us (microseconds, an APM-compatibility field that is null on many spans — sorting on it can silently drop the slowest step). Confirm which is populated before using it. The slowest child span is the bottleneck. Aggregating by span name or the GenAI operation attribute shows the distribution of step types across a workflow — retrieval, LLM call, tool use.

For integration-specific data streams and field names — OpenAI, Azure OpenAI, Azure AI Foundry, Amazon Bedrock, Bedrock AgentCore, GCP Vertex AI — see references/integrations.md. For longer worked queries including the trace-hierarchy walk and the time-series integration pattern, see references/esql-recipes.md.

Examples

The field paths below are illustrative. Confirm the real paths from step 3 before running anything — this skill's own method is to discover field names first, and the correct nesting depends on the ingestion path.

"How many tokens are we burning per model?" — confirm the token attributes exist and resolve, then sum them by model and time bucket. Report the totals returned:

FROM traces-*
| WHERE @timestamp > NOW() - 24 hours AND attributes.gen_ai.request.model IS NOT NULL
| EVAL in_tok = TO_LONG(attributes.gen_ai.usage.input_tokens),
       out_tok = TO_LONG(attributes.gen_ai.usage.output_tokens)
| STATS input_tokens = SUM(in_tok), output_tokens = SUM(out_tok)
    BY hour = BUCKET(@timestamp, 1 hour), attributes.gen_ai.request.model
| SORT hour
| LIMIT 500

"What is our LLM spend?" — look for a cost field with GET /_field_caps on *cost* before querying. If none exists, report token utilization and state plainly that cost is not instrumented in this deployment; adding a cost attribute at the instrumentation layer, or enabling an integration that reports cost, is the fix. Do not multiply tokens by a price you assumed.

"Which model is slowest, and is it failing?" — latency and error rate in one pass, grouped by model:

FROM traces-*
| WHERE @timestamp > NOW() - 24 hours AND attributes.gen_ai.request.model IS NOT NULL
| STATS request_count = COUNT(*),
        failures = COUNT(*) WHERE event.outcome == "failure",
        avg_duration_us = AVG(span.duration.us)
    BY attributes.gen_ai.request.model
| EVAL error_rate = failures::double / request_count
| SORT avg_duration_us DESC
| LIMIT 100

"Why is our agent slow?" — this needs the trace hierarchy, so it requires trace data. Find the traces containing more than one LLM or tool span, ranked by time spent in those spans, then walk into the worst trace by trace.id to find the bottleneck span. Because the WHERE restricts to LLM spans, the sum below is LLM time, not end-to-end trace duration — name the column so it cannot be misread as wall-clock latency:

FROM traces-*
| WHERE @timestamp > NOW() - 3 hours AND attributes.gen_ai.operation.name IS NOT NULL
| STATS llm_span_count = COUNT(*), llm_duration_us = SUM(span.duration.us) BY trace.id
| WHERE llm_span_count > 1
| SORT llm_duration_us DESC
| LIMIT 50

"Are prompts getting blocked?" — check the finish-reason attribute and error.type on the trace path, or the integration's guardrail log events. A finish reason such as a content filter is a quality signal, not a transport error.

"Is there anything already alerting on this?" — GET kbn:/api/alerting/rules/_find and GET kbn:/api/observability/slos, filtered to the LLM-related services or integration metrics identified in step 2.

Guidelines

• Answer only from data ingested into Elastic. Do not describe or rely on other vendors' UIs, consoles, or products. If the data is not in Elastic, the answer is that it is not in Elastic.
• Discover before querying. Confirm the ingestion path (step 2) and the field names (step 3) from GET /_field_caps, GET /<index>/_mapping, or a sample document. Never guess an attribute path.
• One consistent source per question. Do not blend APM traces and integration metrics in a single answer.
• Cost is not in the GenAI spec. Treat a cost figure as available only when a cost field is present in the data.
• Only traces reconstruct chains. If the question is about agentic orchestration and only integration metrics exist, say the chain is not reconstructable rather than approximating it from aggregates.
• Gate time-series syntax on the version. Use TS with TRANGE and TBUCKET on Serverless or Stack 9.4+; fall back to FROM with BUCKET(@timestamp, ...) below that. Alias the bucket (BY bucket = TBUCKET(1 hour)) and sort on the alias.
• Expect type conflicts on dynamically mapped attributes. Token attributes are frequently mapped as integer in one backing index and long in another after a rollover, which makes ES|QL refuse the field. Cast with TO_LONG(...) in an EVAL before aggregating.
• No Kibana UI dependency. Prefer ES|QL and Elasticsearch APIs; use Kibana APIs only for SLOs and alerting. Never instruct the user to open the Kibana UI.
• For ES|QL syntax and query patterns use the elasticsearch-esql skill; the `TS` command reference applies on Stack 9.4+ and Serverless, and the `FROM` command reference applies elsewhere.

Operations