Agent Observability & SLO Framework on Amazon CloudWatch GenAI

Agents fail differently than microservices. Silent hallucinations, tool-use errors, grounding drift, and runaway token cost slip past traditional APM. Until now, no standalone agent-observability + SLO retainer SKU existed on AWS Marketplace: IBM Instana + SoftServe bundle inside platforms; Datadog / New Relic / Dynatrace sell tools, not retainers; Arize / LangSmith / Braintrust are SaaS-first and not CloudWatch-native.

Amazon CloudWatch GenAI Observability (launched late 2025) and Bedrock AgentCore Observability (GA 2026) give AWS Customers native capability but without OpenTelemetry instrumentation, SRE-grade SLO definition, alert wiring, and runbook + post-mortem culture, agents run blind. SRE for agents is a new discipline: multi-step traces across tool calls + model invocations + MCP servers are non-trivial to propagate; non-deterministic workloads require custom metrics (tool-use correctness, grounding score, hallucination rate, refusal rate, trajectory length) that traditional APM doesn't capture; SLOs must account for probabilistic failure modes; cost-per-invocation must be instrumented because token-consumption drift is a silent failure mode; agent-specific runbooks + blameless post-mortems are required. IBM / SoftServe bundle inside platforms; Kriv sells the standalone retained service: 6–9 month first-mover window.

Existing AWS Marketplace listings don't close this gap. IBM Instana + IBM Consulting Advantage bundle inside platform engagements. SoftServe bundles inside modernization SOWs. Slalom / Caylent / Mission Cloud / Rackspace sell general observability at $75K–$300K. Big-4 off-Marketplace $250K–$2M. SaaS observability (Datadog LLM Observability, New Relic AI Monitoring, Dynatrace, Arize AI, LangSmith, Braintrust, Langfuse, Fiddler, WhyLabs, Evidently AI) are subscription tools Customer operates.

Observability components. OpenTelemetry across Bedrock Agents, Claude Agent SDK, LangGraph, AutoGen, CrewAI, MCP servers (W3C Trace Context). X-Ray distributed tracing + service map. CloudWatch GenAI Observability native Bedrock telemetry. Bedrock Model Invocation Logging → CloudWatch Logs + S3. Custom metrics, tool-use correctness, grounding score, hallucination rate, refusal rate, trajectory length, P50/P95/P99 per-tool-call latency, cost-per-invocation, MCP-call success rate. SLO definitions with error budget tracking. RED + USE golden signals per agent. Dashboards in CloudWatch + QuickSight. Alerts via CloudWatch Alarms → EventBridge → SNS → PagerDuty / Opsgenie / Jira / ServiceNow / Slack / Microsoft Teams. Runbooks for silent hallucination, tool-use failure cascade, grounding collapse, cost spike, refusal-rate spike. Blameless post-mortem templates (Google SRE). FinOps via Bedrock Model Invocation Logging + CloudWatch + QuickSight.

Reference architecture. OpenTelemetry SDK instruments Customer agents → AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry (ADOT) Collector on ECS / EKS → Traces to X-Ray, Metrics to CloudWatch, Logs to CloudWatch Logs + S3 → Dashboards in CloudWatch + QuickSight → Alarms via EventBridge + SNS → SLO tracker via CloudWatch Synthetics + custom SLO service in Terraform / CDK → FinOps via Cost Explorer + Bedrock logging.

Implementation schedule (3 weeks).

Week 1 Scoping + SLO workshops (agent inventory; SLO definition with SRE + AI Platform + Product + Customer Success).

Week 2 OpenTelemetry + X-Ray + CloudWatch + QuickSight (OTel SDK instrumentation; ADOT Collector; X-Ray; GenAI Observability wiring; custom metrics; dashboards).

Week 3 Alerts + runbooks + post-mortem templates + handoff.

Three retainer tiers (opt-in monthly). Essentials $8K/mo (up to 3 agents; monthly SLO review; dashboard tuning; quarterly runbook refresh; 8×5 email) for AI-native Series B–E. Standard $14K/mo (up to 10 agents; biweekly SLO review; 24×5 on-call response, not primary; monthly post-mortem co-authorship; CI/CD alert tuning) for mid-sized with production SRE. Enterprise $20K/mo (unlimited agents; 0.25 FTE dedicated Kriv SRE engineer embedded; quarterly SLO audit; regulated-industry evidence, SOC 2 CC7 + SR 11-7 + EU AI Act Article 72 + HIPAA §164.308(a)(1)(ii)(D); quarterly executive readout) for regulated, G-SIB banks, top-25 payers + pharmas. Optional Extra Agent Implementation $12K.

Important disclosures. Kriv does NOT develop Customer agents, instruments them. Retainer is opt-in. Issues no SOC 2 / HIPAA / HITRUST / ISO / 42001 certifications. No legal / regulatory / compliance advice. No SLO-attainment guarantee, SLOs are Customer commitments. No primary-on-call responsibility at Enterprise (dedicated engineer is embed, not replacement). No CloudWatch / X-Ray / Bedrock / OTel API stability guarantee. AWS + Anthropic + Bedrock consumption separate. Anthropic CPN membership does not constitute endorsement.