AI Engineer YouTube · May 28, 2026

How agent o11y differs from traditional o11y — Phil Hetzel, Braintrust

How agent o11y differs from traditional o11y — Phil Hetzel, Braintrust video thumbnail
Why it matters

Traditional observability answers one question: is the system up? Phil Hetzel from Braintrust argues that question is not the right one for agents. An individual agent trace can exceed a gigabyte. A single span can hit 20 megabytes. The data is semistructured, packed with unstructured text, and still arrives in real ti

My takeaway: Traditional observability answers one question: is the system up? Phil Hetzel from Braintrust argues that question is not the right one for agents. An individual agent trace can exceed a gigabyte. A single span can hit 20 megabytes. The data is semistructured, packed with unstructured text, and still arrives in real ti