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LLMOps (AI observability)

Definition

LLMOps is the operating discipline for language model systems in production: tracing every call, tracking cost and latency, monitoring quality, and managing prompt and model changes.

Updated

Also called LLM observability.

How it works

A traditional app either works or throws an error. A language model system can return a fluent, wrong answer with a success status, so you need visibility into the content of each call. LLMOps covers that layer:

  • A trace of every request: the prompt, retrieved documents, tool calls, final output, token count and latency.
  • Cost tracking by feature and by customer, so a runaway loop shows up the same day.
  • Quality monitoring through scheduled evals on a sample of live traffic, plus user signals such as thumbs down or heavy edits.
  • Versioned prompts and model settings, so every output can be tied to the configuration that produced it.

Langfuse, LangSmith, Helicone and Arize Phoenix are common choices for tracing, and several of them accept OpenTelemetry data, which has its own semantic conventions for generative AI calls. Model providers also update and retire models on their own schedules, so someone has to read the deprecation notices.

How businesses use it

After launch, LLMOps answers the two questions a COO asks: is it still giving correct answers, and what does each task cost? This is the work inside our AI ops monitoring plan ($1,500 to $5,000 a month, tooling and usage at cost). It covers a weekly review of traces and flagged outputs, an eval run after any prompt or model change, and a monthly report with cost per task and the failures fixed.

Where it goes wrong

Logging everything and reading nothing. Traces help only if someone reviews a sample each week and turns failures into fixes and test cases.

Logs also hold customer data. Mask personal details before they reach the tracing tool, set retention limits, and check where the vendor stores data before you sign.

Then there are unpinned model versions. If you call a model alias the provider updates, behavior can shift overnight. Pin versions and upgrade on purpose, after the eval set passes.

Scale it to the system. A single internal assistant used by 5 people does not need a tracing platform; the provider's usage dashboard and a monthly review will do.

Related terms

  • LLM evaluation

    LLM evaluation scores a language model system's outputs against a fixed set of real test cases, so you can tell whether a change made it better or worse.

  • AI guardrails

    AI guardrails are checks placed around a language model that block, rewrite or escalate inputs and outputs that break your rules on safety, accuracy, privacy or scope.

  • AI hallucination

    An AI hallucination is output from a language model that is fluent and confident but false, such as an invented citation, policy, figure or product detail.

  • Large language model

    A large language model is a neural network trained on huge volumes of text to predict the next token, which lets it write, summarize, classify and answer questions.

  • Prompt engineering

    Prompt engineering is writing and testing the instructions, examples and context given to a language model so it produces the output a task needs, consistently.

All 30 definitions are in the AI and search glossary.

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