Trace Coverage Audit Before Retainer Renewal (Retention)

Trace Coverage Audit Before Retainer Renewal (Retention)

1. 01

   Pull the last 30 days of trace volume per client agent and compare it to the contracted interaction estimate

   A gap above 20% in either direction means the observability bill and the retainer scope have drifted apart. Flag it before the renewal conversation, not during it.

2. 02

   Confirm every LLM call, tool invocation, and retrieval step in the production path emits a span

   Walk the agent's call graph against the trace tree. Untraced branches are where silent failures live, and they are the first thing a client's own engineer will find.

3. 03

   Reconcile token and compute spend against the invoice line items for the same window

   Prompt caching on the GPT-6 family now discounts cached input tokens by up to 90% within a 30-minute reuse window, so a flat cost curve may mean caching is misconfigured rather than that usage is stable.

4. 04

   Score a sample of 50 production traces against the quality rubric agreed at onboarding

   Rotate the sample across peak and off-peak hours. A rubric that only passes on low-traffic windows is not a rubric, it is a coincidence.

5. 05

   List every failure pattern surfaced in the period and mark which ones have an owner

   Patterns without an owner become renewal objections. Assign each to a named person on the delivery team with a target date.

6. 06

   Package the trace evidence into a one-page renewal appendix with cost, latency, and quality deltas

   Clients renew against evidence, not assurances. Three numbers per agent beat a slide of adjectives.