Observability for the Agentic Harness

OpenTelemetry logging, Evals & FinOps for AI Agents

1. Introduction

Harness is the new buzzword in the agentic AI world. As AI agents gain adoption at enterprises, developing agents has become the easy part. The challenging part then is to run them at scale, in a consistent fashion.

For anyone actually building agentic AI systems at enterprises, and applying software engineering best-practices and well-architected frameworks at scale — none of this should come as a surprise.

While Anthropic prompted the concept for agentic coding, it applies equally well to any agentic design.

The core hypothesis is that the focus has shifted from the LLM, to building an effective harness around the LLM, such that the agentic execution can be managed with reliability and accountability guarantees.

Hence, the move from isolated intelligence to managed executions. The key building blocks include (illustrated in Fig. 1):

Fig. 1: Agentic AI harness building blocks (Image by Author)

• Reasoning loop…