RFC-0001: AGENTOBS — Observability Schema Standard for Agentic AI Systems

Overview

RFC-0001 defines AGENTOBS — an open event-schema standard for observability of agentic AI systems. It addresses the fundamental gap between general-purpose APM tooling and the requirements of production AI systems: structured cost attribution, PII redaction at source, tamper-evident audit chains, and a coherent span tree for multi-step agent runs.

What This Specification Covers

AGENTOBS standardises nine interconnected capabilities:

1. Event Envelope — a typed, immutable container applied uniformly to every observability event, carrying identity, routing, and security fields alongside a namespace-specific payload.
2. Namespace Taxonomy — thirty-six event types across eleven domains (trace, cost, cache, eval, guard, fence, prompt, redact, diff, template, audit), each with a typed payload schema.
3. Agent Span Hierarchy — SpanPayload, AgentStepPayload, and AgentRunPayload types that represent multi-step runs as an OpenTelemetry-compatible span tree, including ReasoningStep and DecisionPoint sub-types.
4. Token and Cost Model — TokenUsage with per-category breakdowns and CostBreakdown as a typed value object — not a bare float — enabling reproducible cost attribution months after a call is made.
5. Provider Normalisation — a language-neutral ProviderNormalizer protocol with built-in mappings for OpenAI, Anthropic, Vertex AI, Bedrock, Azure AI, Groq, Ollama, Mistral, Cohere, Together AI, and Hugging Face.
6. HMAC Audit Chains — HMAC-SHA256 signing with prev_id linkage, verify_chain() with structured tamper detection, and key rotation without chain discontinuity.
7. PII Redaction Framework — a five-level sensitivity scale (LOW → PHI), Redactable type with annotations at construction time, and RedactionPolicy enforcement before any export.
8. Export Abstraction — structural Exporter protocol with reference implementations for JSONL, Webhook, OTLP, Datadog, Grafana Loki, and OTel SDK bridging.
9. Governance Primitives — EventGovernancePolicy, ConsumerRegistry, DeprecationRegistry, and migration_roadmap() for managing schema evolution at scale.

Conformance Profiles

The specification defines four cumulative conformance profiles to enable incremental adoption:

Profile	What it adds
Core	Event Envelope, ULID, spans, tokens, cost, export, OTel alignment
Security	HMAC signing, audit chains, key rotation
Privacy	Redactable type, RedactionPolicy, pre-export redaction
Enterprise	Governance policy, ConsumerRegistry, DeprecationRegistry, CLI compliance checks

A team can reach AGENTOBS-Core-2.0 conformance by implementing five things: Event Envelope with auto-generated ULID, SpanPayload with TokenUsage, deterministic JSON serialisation, one Exporter, and OTel attribute mapping at export time.

Specification Status

• Status: Public Review Draft
• Version: 2.0 (targeting v2.0 data model)
• Schema: schemas/v1.0/schema.json (stable normative artifact)
• Public comment period: April 3, 2026 — June 4, 2026
• Issues: github.com/veerarag1973/Spanforge/issues