# Observability

Source: https://customlabs.io/glossary/observability/
Updated: 2026-09-13

Evaluation

# Observability

Observability captures traces of every prompt, retrieval, tool call, and response for debugging.

It tracks quality, latency, and cost over time, beyond whether the request simply returned a 200.

Without it, a regression surfaces as a vague complaint that "the AI got worse," with no clear cause.

It is the operational counterpart to an eval suite: evals catch regressions before ship, this catches them after.

[Insight: Evals before you ship](https://customlabs.io/insights/evals-before-you-ship/)[Capabilities](https://customlabs.io/capabilities/)

[← Back to the full glossary](https://customlabs.io/glossary/)

## Related terms

[Agent (Agentic AI) An agent is an LLM given a loop, memory, and tools it can call.](https://customlabs.io/glossary/agent/)[LLM-as-Judge LLM-as-judge uses another LLM to score a model's outputs against a rubric, at scale.](https://customlabs.io/glossary/llm-as-judge/)[Output Drift Output drift is a gradual change in a live system's output, with no release behind it.](https://customlabs.io/glossary/output-drift/)[Shadow Deployment A shadow deployment runs a candidate release against real production traffic, offline, before release.](https://customlabs.io/glossary/shadow-deployment/)

## More in Evaluation

[Eval Suite (Evals) An eval suite is a versioned set of test cases that measures whether outputs are good.](https://customlabs.io/glossary/eval-suite/)[Hallucination A hallucination is a confident, fluent output that is factually wrong or unsupported.](https://customlabs.io/glossary/hallucination/)[Prompt Injection Prompt injection is untrusted input crafted to override a model's system prompt or task.](https://customlabs.io/glossary/prompt-injection/)