For decades, the observability industry has answered one basic question: Is it running? Agentic artificial intelligence breaks that model. An agent can return a clean response, meet its latency target and throw no errors, yet still give a customer the wrong answer, call the wrong tool or pull from a stale knowledge base.
By every traditional metric, the system is healthy, but the only metric that matters to the business is that it failed. That’s the gap Amazon Web Services Inc. is targeting with Amazon CloudWatch Omni (pictured), which became generally available last week. AWS positions Omni as the next generation of CloudWatch.
It’s app-centric, runs outside the AWS Management Console, is built on OpenTelemetry and embeds AI. This shifts observability from “Is it running?” to “Why did my agent do that?” I’d argue that’s the question standing between most enterprises and production-scale agentic AI. AWS cites an IDC forecast of more than 1 billion deployed agents…
