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You have a Microsoft Foundry project that contains a high-traffic agent.
After a recent update, operational costs increase significantly.
Monitoring confirms that the volume of user traffic to the agent remains unchanged.
You suspect that changes to the request or response characteristics are causing the increase.
You need to identify whether the additional costs are driven by the model input size, the model output size, or expanded tool usage.
Which observability capability should you use?
The correct capability is token usage. In Microsoft Foundry observability, token consumption is the primary signal for diagnosing model-cost changes when request volume is unchanged. Token usage lets you distinguish whether costs increased because prompts became larger, retrieved or tool-provided context expanded, responses became longer, or agent execution added more model calls. Microsoft Foundry monitoring dashboards track operational metrics such as token consumption, latency, error rates, and quality scores, and the agent monitoring dashboard is specifically intended to help analyze token usage, latency, success rates, and evaluation outcomes for production traffic.
This directly matches the scenario because the issue is not more traffic, but changed request or response characteristics. Input tokens reveal whether the prompt, chat history, grounding data, or tool outputs being sent to the model increased. Output tokens reveal whether the model is generating longer completions. Expanded tool usage can also increase cost indirectly by adding more tool results, intermediate calls, and context into subsequent model requests; Foundry tracing and observability capture tool usage and token consumption for agent runs.
Evaluation metrics assess response quality and safety, not cost drivers. Latency identifies performance delays, and run success rate measures reliability. Reference topics: Microsoft Foundry observability, agent monitoring dashboard, token consumption, cost analysis, tool usage, and production monitoring.