Your AI Agent Has No Nervous System
Conference Context
- Date/time: 2026-07-01 · 11:10am-11:30am
- Track/room: track TBD · Expo Stage 4 SE
- Speaker(s): Matt Gibiec
- Session type/status: session · confirmed
- Track: track TBD
- Room: Expo Stage 4 SE
- Session type: session
- Status: confirmed
Session Description
Most agents ship with solid evals and zero runtime observability. When something breaks in production — wrong answer, runaway retry loop, or silent tool failure — you're debugging blind. You can see the output, but you can't see what the agent believed when it made the decision. This talk walks through how to instrument agentic pipelines with OpenTelemetry: capturing system context at every step, making prompt state and tool call outcomes visible as structured data, and governing token consumption as SLOs instead of discovering overruns on an invoice. Attendees will leave with three takeaways: an understanding of telemetry for multi-step agentic workflows, a pattern for capturing system context at the span level so teams know exactly what the agent saw before it acted, and a framework for visibility into token budget and behavioral drift before something goes sideways in production. Telemetry is the nervous system. System context is the memory. Token budgets are the vital signs. None of it is optional.
Media Evidence
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Evidence Graph
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People
Notes
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Synthesis
Synthesized Breakdown
Your AI Agent Has No Nervous System ## Conference Context - Date/time: 2026-07-01 · 11:10am-11:30am - Track/room: track TBD · Expo Stage 4 SE - Speaker(s): Matt Gibiec - Session type/status: session · confirmed - Track: track TBD - Room: Expo Stage 4 SE - Session type: session - Status: confirmed ## Session Description Most agents ship with solid evals and zero runtime observability. When something breaks in production — wrong answer, runaway retry loop, or silent tool failure — you're debugging blind. You can see the output, but you can't see what the agent believed when it made the decision. This talk walks through how to instrument agentic pipelines with OpenTelemetry: capturing system context at every step, making prompt state and tool call outcomes visible as structured data, and governing token consumption as SLOs instead of discovering overruns on an invoice.
Speaker And Company Context
- Matt Gibiec — Regional Director, Solutions Engineering at Dynatrace.
Topics Covered
Derived Links And Source Material
Novel Concepts / Clever Methods
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Evidence Boundary
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