Observing a Large Language Model in Production - Phillip Carter, Honeycomb
Channel: CNCF [Cloud Native Computing Foundation]
Date: 2023-11-22

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Observing a Large Language Model in Production - Phillip Carter, Honeycomb

Like many tech companies, Honeycomb released a feature using an API backed by a Large Language Model (LLM) this year. However, unlike most APIs, those that call LLMs are non-deterministic and inherently unreliable. So how do we know that it's doing what we need? What are the different factors that matter to our users, and how can we measure them? Subtle changes to a prompt in an LLM can have huge changes on its behavior, so how do we understand the impact of our prompt changes? We asked all these questions and more during development, and we think we have a good way to answer them through careful instrumentation and Observability practices. In this talk, I'll go through how we instrumented our feature, what we tracked, what SLOs we set up, and how we measured our improvements as we iterated on the feature. Attendees should come away with a good idea of how they can blend the worlds of prompt engineering and Observability to build better products.