Cohere Observability
Overview
Expose enough evidence to separate application, retrieval, model, capacity, and provider failures without logging credentials or customer content.
Prerequisites
- The target repository, runtime, environment, and accountable owner
- An approved Cohere team and key for any live verification
- Current quality, security, privacy, capacity, and change-control requirements
Tool Discipline
Use Read, Glob, and Grep to inspect code, configuration, and evidence. Use WebFetch only for current Cohere primary documentation. Use Write or Edit only when the user requested implementation and the exact target files are known; never write credentials or customer content.
Current Contract
- Measure queue, retrieval, provider, first-event, completion, and tool durations separately.
- Label metrics with bounded dimensions such as endpoint, operation, resolved model, environment, outcome, and retry class.
- Keep prompts, documents, embeddings, keys, and raw tool arguments out of telemetry by default.
- Pair operational metrics with sampled quality, citation, and safety evaluations.
Authentication
Use an environment-specific key injected from an approved secret manager. Never print, persist, commit, or place CO_API_KEY in an example. Confirm access with the least costly bounded operation appropriate to the task, and treat key creation, rotation, revocation, role changes, and production-capacity requests as owner-approved actions.
Instructions
- Define service objectives and an allowlist of telemetry fields before instrumenting.
- Create counters for requests, outcomes, retries, throttles, circuit transitions, and tool decisions.
- Create histograms for queue, retrieval, provider, first-event, completion, and end-to-end duration.
- Record usage and cost units without tenant names or unbounded request IDs as metric labels.
- Build alerts for availability, sustained throttling, queue age, latency, quality, and spend.
- Test redaction, trace propagation, stream cancellation, and incident correlation.
Approval Boundaries
Do not expose or rotate keys, change Cohere Team roles, accept commercial terms, enable sensitive production data, increase spend or capacity, switch production models, send a support bundle, or execute model-proposed side effects without the accountable owner's approval. Keep diagnosis read-only unless implementation was requested.
Output
Return the resolved API and model contract, files or settings inspected, evidence collected, validation result, remaining risk, owner, and rollback or next action. Redact keys, authorization headers, prompts, retrieved documents, embeddings, customer identifiers, and unrestricted environment output.
Error Handling
| Condition | Response |
|---|---|
| Cardinality spike | Remove unbounded labels and aggregate request identifiers in logs only. |
| Prompt in trace | Redact it and review retained telemetry as a data incident. |
| Missing terminal event | Mark the stream incomplete and count a distinct outcome. |
| False provider alert | Split local queue/retrieval time from Cohere duration. |
Examples
Use this compact handoff shape to keep the selected scope, validation evidence, and operational result reviewable.
Input:
service=rag-api; backend=otel; content-logging=off; quality-sampling=1%
Expected handoff:
metrics=bounded; traces=redacted; slo=defined; alerts=tested