Inference Observability: Why You Don't See the...

The bill arrives before the alert does. Because the system that creates the cost isn't the system you're monitoring. Inference observability isn't a tooling problem — it's a layer problem. Your APM stack tracks latency. Your infrastructure monitoring tracks GPU utilization. Neither one tracks the routing decision that sent a thousand requests to your most expensive model, or the prompt length drift that silently doubled your token consumption over three weeks. By the time your cost alert fires,