# Observe (workflow)

Stage 2. With traces flowing in, **observe** what your AI is actually doing in production.

## The question this stage answers

*"What is my AI doing — and where is it surprising me?"*

## What to do

1. **Browse the trace list.** Filter by tags, by time range, by span errors. Look for outliers.
2. **Drill into a sampled subset.** Pick 20-30 traces from different time slices; read them.
3. **Tag patterns.** When you find an interesting trace shape (a known good, a known bad, an edge case), tag it. Tags become the foundation of your test set.
4. **Notice latency and cost outliers.** Span-level latency and cost surface in the trace inspector.

## What you'll have at the end

* A working sense of what production looks like
* A small tagged set of "interesting" traces — your starter trace set for evaluation
* Hypotheses about where quality might drift

## Don't yet

* Don't define gates yet — you don't have enough signal
* Don't optimize prompts yet — you'll be optimizing on hunches

## Where to next

* [Compare →](/7.-observe-see-whats-happening/workflow.md)
* [Stratix Premium — Traces](/7.-observe-see-whats-happening/traces.md)
* [Concept: Traces and spans](/6.-build-wire-your-code/traces-and-spans.md)
* [Continuous evaluation (concept)](/7.-observe-see-whats-happening/continuous-evaluation.md)


---

# Agent Instructions: Querying This Documentation

If you need additional information that is not directly available in this page, you can query the documentation dynamically by asking a question.

Perform an HTTP GET request on the current page URL with the `ask` query parameter:

```
GET https://docs.layerlens.ai/7.-observe-see-whats-happening/workflow.md?ask=<question>
```

The question should be specific, self-contained, and written in natural language.
The response will contain a direct answer to the question and relevant excerpts and sources from the documentation.

Use this mechanism when the answer is not explicitly present in the current page, you need clarification or additional context, or you want to retrieve related documentation sections.