Skip to content

RAG Observability and Logging

What to log in a RAG system so you can debug bad answers, measure quality and control cost.

Editorial team 1 min read

When a user reports a wrong answer, you need to see exactly what happened. Good logging makes RAG debuggable.

What to Log per Request

  • The original question and any rewritten queries.
  • Retrieved chunk IDs, scores and sources — before and after re-ranking.
  • The final prompt (or a reference to its template version).
  • The model, settings and response.
  • Citations produced.
  • Latency per stage and token counts.
  • User feedback, if given.

Dashboards

Track answer volume, feedback ratings, "couldn't find" rates, latency percentiles, cost per request and the most common questions.

Finding Problems

  • Questions with negative feedback.
  • Answers with no citations.
  • Retrieval with low top scores (likely content gaps).
  • Spikes in latency or cost.

Privacy

Logs may contain personal and confidential information. Restrict access, redact where possible and set retention limits.

Sampling for Review

Regularly review a random sample of interactions, not just flagged ones, to catch silent failures.

Close the Loop

Turn discovered failures into test cases, and track whether fixes improve metrics over time.

More in RAG

All RAG guides →
RAG Guide · 1 min

RAG Architecture: The Components End to End

A map of a complete retrieval-augmented generation system, from ingestion to answer, and what each component is responsible for.

RAG 1 min read 6 Dec 2025

RAG Guide · 2 min

Document Parsing for RAG

Turning PDFs, slides, HTML and scans into clean, structured text — the unglamorous step that decides RAG quality.

RAG 2 min read 5 Dec 2025

RAG Guide · 2 min

Chunk Size and Overlap Tuning

How to choose chunk size and overlap for retrieval by testing against real questions rather than guessing.

RAG 2 min read 4 Dec 2025

RAG Guide · 2 min

Hybrid Search for RAG

Combining keyword and vector search so RAG finds both exact terms and paraphrased meaning.

RAG 2 min read 3 Dec 2025