Monitoring the Sales Contract Management agent

Edit online

In the final part of the tutorial, you monitor the performance, activity, and overall health of the Sales Contract Management agent. By reviewing traces and key metrics, you can quickly identify issues, optimize the agent’s behavior, and help ensure that it consistently delivers business value.

Before you begin

If you have a watsonx.governance instance in the same IBM Cloud region as your IBM watsonx Orchestrate instance, you can monitor deployed agents directly from the watsonx.governance dashboard. In other cases, you can access only traces and metrics from the Agent analytics page on watsonx Orchestrate.

For more information, see Prerequisites for monitoring the agents.

Monitoring the agent analytics

To analyze agent metrics, evaluate performance, and identify the root cause of errors, you can follow these steps:

  1. On IBM watsonx Orchestrate, select Analyze from the menu.

  2. On the Agent analytics page, select the Sales Contract Management agent from the Agents table.

  3. Look at the Traces table to see the agent's activity. If you find an error, click the trace to see the details.

Tips to analyze traces

  • In the left panel of the trace, the red dots indicate failed spans, by showing you exactly which service or operation caused the error, for example, the wxo-server, tools-runtime, model call, and others.

  • The horizontal bars represent how long each operation took. If a long-running operation fails, it can indicate timeout issues, tool latency, slow model response, among others.

  • Trace parent–child relationships to see what triggered the failure. Errors often happen inside a tool or a nested step, and traces show you where the chain broke.

  • Each span usually contains metadata (inputs, outputs, errors). Using traces, you can inspect:

    • What the agent sent to each tool or model.

    • What the tool returned.

    • Whether malformed or missing data caused a downstream failure.

See more information in Trace details.

Monitoring the agent on watson.gorvenance dashboard

In cases the monitoring agent on watson.gorvenance dashboard is available, you can follow these steps:

  1. On IBM watsonx Orchestrate, select Analyze from the menu.

  2. On the Agent analytics page, search for the Sales Contract Management agent from the Agents table.

  3. In the Monitor column for the selected agent, toggle to on.

  4. In the message window that appears, click Activate agent monitoring.

After the activation process is complete, you click the dashboard icon, which redirects you to the watson.gorvenance dashboard. In this dashboard, you can view some agent metrics for usage and performance of conversations, tool cal quality, alerts, and others.

See more information in Evaluating AI agents and agentic applications.