Audit vs Platform
AI Agent Audit vs Observability Platform
Should you buy LangSmith, Langfuse, or Braintrust, or commission a scored audit of one agent? These solve different problems.
LangSmith, Langfuse, and Braintrust are telemetry and eval products. Zenovae is not those products. An audit is a judgment on one system, delivered as a report. A platform is software you operate yourself.
Side-by-side comparison
| Decision factor | Observability platform | Agent reliability audit | Best fit |
|---|---|---|---|
| What you get | Software. Dashboards, trace storage, eval harnesses that your team configures and operates. | A judgment. A written score of one agent and the three changes that would move it. | Platform for ongoing operations; audit for a decision now. |
| Who does the work | Your engineers. Someone has to instrument, configure scorers, and read the dashboards. | Zenovae, over 10 business days. You provide traces or staging access. | Audit when nobody has slack to operate a platform. |
| Time to answer | Weeks of instrumentation before the first useful signal. | Days 1–2 define the task and the failures you refuse to ship. Days 8–10 deliver the report. | Audit when the release decision is this month. |
| Ongoing visibility | Continuous. Traces and evals keep running after setup. | Point-in-time. The audit scores what exists now; it is not a subscription. | Platform after the agent is stable and someone can own it. |
| Cost shape | Subscription plus the engineering time to operate it. | Fixed fee. Zenovae does not publish a dollar rate; the number is stated on the scoping call. | Depends on whether you need a system or an answer. |
Choose Observability platform when
- You need continuous telemetry and your team can operate it.
- The agent is stable and the question is monitoring, not readiness.
- You want to run your own eval harness over time.
Choose Agent reliability audit when
- You need a written score before a release decision.
- Nobody has slack to instrument and operate a platform this quarter.
- You want three prioritized changes, not a dashboard to explore.
Where Zenovae fits
The Agent Reliability Audit is a fixed, 10-business-day scored review: task success, wrong-tool calls, cost per successful task, and approval gaps.
The two are not mutually exclusive. Teams often buy a platform after an audit tells them the agent is worth operating long-term.
FAQ
Is an AI agent audit a replacement for LangSmith?
No. LangSmith, Langfuse, and Braintrust are telemetry and eval products you operate yourself. An audit is a judgment on one system, delivered as a report. Teams often adopt a platform after an audit proves the agent is worth operating.
What does the audit deliver?
A written score of task success, wrong-tool calls, cost per successful task, and approval gaps, plus the three changes that would move the number. It is not a workshop, not a rebuild, and not a security certification.
Do we need traces before the audit?
Traces or staging runs must exist or be producible in the first two days. If the agent is a demo with no traces and no task definition, do not buy the audit.