Which production metrics would you monitor for an AI feature?

Balances task quality, safety, reliability, latency, tokens, cost, refusals, repairs, and fallbacks by route and slice.

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TL;DR

I monitor standard service signals such as request rate, errors, latency, saturation, and dependency health, then add AI-specific signals tied to the task. Those include task success or sampled quality, unsupported or unsafe behavior, refusal and abstention rates, schema failures, tool failures, repair attempts, fallbacks, token usage, and estimated cost. Metrics are segmented by model, prompt, route, feature, and important user or task slices.

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Signal selection, metric interpretation, segmentation, and avoidance of vanity dashboards.

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Core answer
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Overview
AI monitoring needs both ordinary service health and sampled evidence about response behavior.
I monitor standard service signals such as request rate, errors, latency, saturation, and dependency health, then add AI-specific signals tied to the task. Those include task success or sampled quality, unsupported or unsafe behavior, refusal and abstention rates, schema failures, tool failures, repair attempts, fallbacks, token usage, and estimated cost. Metrics are segmented by model, prompt, route, feature, and important user or task slices.
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Stronger answer
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A rising refusal rate may mean improved safety, a broken prompt, or a new traffic mix, so no signal is interpreted alone. I compare quality with latency and cost because a model change can improve one while making the feature economically or operationally unusable. Dashboards expose distributions and tail latency, not only averages, and alerts focus on actionable deviations from a baseline or service objective.

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Common mistakesCandidateCommon mistakesMistakes that weaken the answer or signal shallow understanding.Open details

Details

Monitoring only provider uptime and latency.
Treating refusal rate as inherently good or bad.
Using averages that hide tail behavior.

Which production metrics would you monitor for an AI feature?

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