Five signals of the trust layer
Signal 1 · Actions
Record every meaningful tool call, external action, system change, and approval. This creates an auditable action trail.
Signal 2 · Evidence
Capture the information the agent relied on: retrieved sources, structured data, policies, and user inputs. This makes output quality diagnosable.
Signal 3 · Decisions
Track the decision path at an appropriate level: what route was selected, what confidence or rule triggered it, and where the workflow escalated.
Signal 4 · Outcomes
Measure whether the action actually achieved the business objective. A successful API call is not necessarily a successful business outcome.
Signal 5 · Exceptions
Make failures visible: hallucinations, tool errors, policy conflicts, missing permissions, low-confidence cases, and human overrides should all feed an improvement loop.
You need to know not only whether it ran, but what it did and why.
Trust by design
Observability is not a dashboard added after launch. It is part of the architecture that allows teams to operate agentic systems responsibly at scale.
