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mediumOpenAIAnthropicGlean

Design observability for an LLM application. What do you log, trace, and alert on, and how is it different from normal services?

Standard observability tells you the request returned 200 in 800ms. It cannot tell you the answer was wrong. The strong answer names the new failure plane LLMs introduce, and takes a real position on the prompts-and-PII question.

Updated Aug 2026 · Grounded in real Forward Deployed Engineer interview loops and written to a senior-engineer editorial bar.

Standard observability tells you the request returned 200 in 800ms. It cannot tell you the answer was wrong. The strong answer names the new failure plane LLMs introduce, and takes a real position on the prompts-and-PII question.

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