2026-10-11 16:37 UTC

Tessary releases an open-source agent reliability platform that monitors every production trace, uses cheap classifiers to detect issues, groups findings into cases, and performs RCA over traces and code.

state: seedheat: lowuncertainty: mediumconvergesscott: highagent-observability agent-evaluation agent-reliabilityAkhiltessaryai

What is this?

Tessary is an open-source agent reliability platform launched via Show HN by Akhil (akhilvarma21/tessaryai). It ingests every production OTLP trace, runs cheap narrow classifiers (cost drift, duration drift, tool-call error drift) across all traces — not sampled evals — groups detected issues into findings/cases, and performs root-cause investigation using trace evidence and the agent codebase. The project is early (v1.10.0, zero-comment Show HN), with GitHub repos, Docker images, and docs at docs.tessary.ai.

Why it matters to Scott

Tessary independently implements Scott's core production-agent architecture: cheap classifiers on 100% of traces (cheap-model-front-door, verification-cost restructuring), drift detection across cost/duration/tool-calls (drift-monitoring, three-tier-error-budgets), case grouping and RCA over traces+codebase (cognitive-provenance, replay-driven-design-evolution, agentic-diagnostic-loop), all on OTLP/OpenTelemetry (his LiteLLM/Langfuse stack). This is not merely an example of his pattern — it's a full-stack realization of the 12-Factor 'Observable Autonomy' principle and the evaluation-driven loop he argues for, built open-source at the exact layer (deterministic control plane + cheap classification + trace-backed RCA) where Scott operates. Early-stage Show HN means potential to engage, adopt, or influence.
ip:framework.12-factor-agents-frameworkip:concept.agent-observabilityip:concept.agent-receiptsip:concept.cheap-model-front-doorip:concept.drift-monitoringip:framework.three-tier-error-budgetsip:concept.cognitive-provenanceip:framework.replay-driven-design-evolutionip:concept.verification-costip:concept.evaluation-driven-developmentdev:concept.cheap-model-front-doordev:concept.agentic-diagnostic-loopdev:concept.trace-backed-agent-comparisondev:concept.deterministic-agent-control-planedev:technology.litellmdev:technology.langfusedev:technology.ollamaradar:agent-lens-v030-tracingradar:grafana-agento11y-coding-observabilityradar:otel-genai-private-metrics-sketchesradar:agent-write-timeout-duplicate-writesradar:runtape-counterfactual-agent-debuggingradar:ctx-agent-session-blameradar:ctx-agent-code-provenanceradar:ouroboros-trace-assisted-debuggingradar:wtf-local-agent-change-inspectorradar:wy-terminal-ai-code-understandingradar:trueforge-open-agent-harnessradar:hermes-agent-open-harnessradar:strands-harness-releaseradar:langchain-deepagents-harnessradar:openclaw-2-accidental-releaseradar:shunt-claude-code-token-savingsradar:token-warden-memory-rentradar:tokencompress-agent-context-pruningradar:tokenops-whole-run-budgetradar:local-kv-cache-pressure-proberadar:smolbenchmark-device-energy-rankingsradar:intelligence-per-watt-local-ai-metricradar:intelligence-per-watt-local-coverageradar:tracarbon-local-llm-power-telemetry
queries asked of Scott's wikis
  • agent observability production monitoring vs sampled evals
  • open-source agent tooling reliability platform patterns
  • OTLP OpenTelemetry integration agent traces
  • cheap classifier drift detection cost duration tool-call
  • agent root cause analysis trace codebase investigation
  • local inference economics monitoring every trace

Measured heat

now 0 pts/hpeak 1 pts/hcomments 0/hpeers p16momentum: steady2 platformsage 51h
points/hour across evidence · reading as of 2026-10-12 02:59:37.977291+11:00 · deterministic, not a model opinion

How the heat travelled

10-09 13:00⭐ origin echo-reconstructedShow HN: Tessary — open-source agent reliability platform monitoring every OTLP trace, cheap classifiers, grouping findings into cases, LLM
tessaryai (infinitetrooper, Akhil) on github (echo) · attributed from hn.story.50033189
—
10-10 14:09first on hacker news · published · +25.2hShow HN: Tessary – Find the AI agent failures your sampled evals miss
infinitetrooper
—
10-10 14:09amplified on hacker news 👑hn.story.50033189
infinitetrooper
peak 1 · 0 comments · 106% of case engagement
10-10 15:33our radar first saw it · +26.6hdiscovery anchor: hn.story.50033189—
pace: p10 vs 1204 stories at the 48h mark (now 51h old) — behind 3jsbench-llm-3d-generation-benchmark (0.5x)

Evidence (2) — ⭐ canonical anchor

sourceobjectauthorscorecomments
🟧 hnShow HN: Tessary – Find the AI agent failures your sampled evals miss
Retrieved article excerpt

Open article · Retrieved 2026-10-10T15:42:27.971088+00:00

# Tessary

Stop your agents from failing silently in production.

[Docs](https://docs.tessary.ai) ·
[Self-host](https://github.com/tessaryai/tessary#get-running) ·
[Report an issue](https://github.com/tessaryai/tessary/issues) ·
[Discussions](https://github.com/tessaryai/tessary/discussions)

[Apache 2.0 license](https://github.com/tessaryai/tessary/blob/main/LICENSE)
[Latest release](https://github.com/tessaryai/tessary/releases)
[Docker pulls](https://hub.docker.com/r/tessaryai/tessary)
[CI status](https://github.com/tessaryai/tessary/actions/workflows/check.yml)

Tessary is an open-source reliability platform for AI agents in production. It monitors every trace, detects issues using cheap classifiers, groups related findings into cases, and investigates their root cause using trace and repository evidence.

## Get running

To try it without installing anything, sign up for Tessary Cloud at <https://app.tessary.ai>. It's free, needs no credit card, and its limits are on the [pricing page](https://tessary.ai/pricing).

To self-host, paste this into your coding agent:

```
Self-host Tessary for me by following https://github.com/tessaryai/tessary/blob/main/setup.md
```

[`setup.md`](https://github.com/tessaryai/tessary/blob/main/setup.md) is written as instructions to an agent: install what's missing, bring every service up, verify the frontend, and hand back the URL.

Prefer to run it yourself? The same install is one command, with nothing cloned and no `.env` to edit:

```
docker compose -f oci://docker.io/tessaryai/tessary:compose up -d -y
```

Either way, open <http://localhost> when `docker compose -p tessary ps` reports every service healthy. It needs Docker Engine 26 or newer and Docker Compose v2.34 or newer on the machine. [Set up Tessary](https://github.com/tessaryai/tessary/blob/main/docs/self-hosting/setup.mdx) takes it from there.

Once it's running, instrument your agent so Tessary has traces to watch: see the [instrumentation overview](https://docs.tessary.ai/instrument/overview).

### 1. Point your agent's traces at it

Send OTLP traces to the endpoint shown during setup and add `tessary.call_site.id` to spans that invoke a model. Use [`instrument.md`](https://github.com/tessaryai/tessary/blob/main/instrument.md) to have a coding agent identify and instrument these call sites.

### 2. Connect the repo (optional)

Connect a GitHub repository under **Settings > Git integration** and both triage and RCA cite the code that produced the failing traces.

## How it works

1. **Watch every trace.** OTLP over HTTP and gRPC, and SDK push, normalize to the OpenTelemetry `gen_ai.*` conventions at the edge. PII (personally identifiable information) redaction runs before storage.
2. **Filter cheaply.** Classifiers sweep every trace continuously and open a finding when one fires. The per-trace check stays cheap enough to afford at production volume, which is what makes reading all of it possible instead of sampling. Two classifiers are exceptions, and both are off until you turn them on: `frustration` scores eligible user messages with a hosted model on your own OpenRouter or TypeSafe key, and `groundedness` checks answers against their retrieved documents with a public model you run on a Mac with Apple silicon or a GPU instance on AWS, not an LLM call.
3. **Group into cases.** Related findings collapse into one case, surfaced on **Triage**. An LLM triage step rules whether a finding is a real deviation rather than a legitimate change, and only a finding it rules real becomes a case. Two kinds of finding are ruled when they are filed instead, because their numbers are the claim: a high-confidence secret leak, and a rise in frustrated conversations.
4. **Explain the case.** RCA runs an agentic session over the failing traces and, when a repo is connected, the code itself. It returns a one-sentence summary, the causes it found with the traces behind each, and the checks it ruled out.
5. **Route it to a human.** An alert carries the case to whoever owns it. Tessary explains and hands off. It doesn't open the fix.

## License

Tessary is licensed under the [Apache License 2.0](https://github.com/tessaryai/tessary/blob/main/LICENSE).

## Telemetry

A self-hosted instance sends one anonymous heartbeat to `home.tessary.ai` at backend start and every 6 hours after. It carries a schema version, an install id, a ping sequence number, a timestamp, the edition, the app version, the host OS family and CPU architecture, install-wide totals of projects, ingested spans, findings, cases, and classifier detections, and the hash of the model price book it holds. On the same schedule it checks `home.tessary.ai` for a newer price book and downloads it only when the hash has changed. It never carries trace or prompt content, an email address, an org or project name, a hostname, or a retained IP address.

```
TESSARY_TELEMETRY_ENABLED=false
```

Set that in `.env` and the instance makes no call to that host, DNS lookups included, and loses nothing: no feature, license check, or in-app behavior depends on the heartbeat reaching us. The field-by-field contract is [the telemetry contract](https://github.com/tessaryai/tessary/blob/main/devdocs/reference/telemetry-contract.md).

## Contributing

[`CONTRIBUTING.md`](https://github.com/tessaryai/tessary/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md) explains how to open an issue or a pull request, how to run the checks locally, and what to expect from review. [The documentation map](https://github.com/tessaryai/tessary/blob/main/devdocs/README.md) is where to start reading the rest.

## Security

Report a vulnerability privately by emailing [email protected]. See [`SECURITY.md`](https://github.com/tessaryai/tessary/blob/main/SECURITY.md) for what to expect.
infinitetrooper10
🟧 echo.github ⭐Show HN: Tessary — open-source agent reliability platform monitoring every OTLP trace, cheap classifiers, grouping findings into cases, LLM tessaryai (infinitetrooper, Akhil)——

Interpretation history

Decision trace