novatechflow | Alexander Alten

Agent observability breaks down when teams try to force long-lived, stateful workflows into dashboards built for stateless microservices. In production, the real challenge is not collecting more logs. It is reconstructing what the agent saw, what state changed, which tool response altered the workflow, and why the system kept going. This article explains why replayable event streams are a better foundation for multi-agent tracing, how a Kafka-first design makes session replay practical, and where conventional tracing still helps but falls short on its own. The production failure that changed how we instrument agents I still remember the first time one of our production agent systems failed without actually crashing. An invoice-processing agent entered a recursive reasoning loop and burned through hundreds of dollars in API credits over a weekend because it kept insisting a validation error existed when it did not. We had logs. We had metrics. We had distributed traces. None of...