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Vetro Attest vs. Datadog LLM Observability

*Engineering comparison, not legal advice. Datadog's product and pricing change over time; check their documentation for current details.*

Datadog LLM Observability brings LLM and agent monitoring into the Datadog platform. Vetro Attest does one narrow thing: it turns a single agent run into evidence an outsider can verify. If you already run Datadog, there is no reason to drop it. The question is what you show an auditor.

What Datadog LLM Observability does well

• End-to-end tracing of LLM calls, chains and agent steps, with latency, token usage, errors and cost;
• Correlation with the rest of your stack: APM traces, infrastructure metrics, logs, so an LLM problem can be tied to the service or host that caused it;
• Quality and safety checks on inputs and outputs, and dashboards and monitors that alert on-call engineers;
• Enterprise operations: access control, retention settings, and one vendor for observability across the company.

For running LLM features in production at scale, a unified platform is valuable.

What monitoring does not give you

Observability data is operational data. It answers "is the system healthy, and why not?" Evidence answers a different question: "can someone who does not trust us verify what happened?"

• Retention is configured for operations. Observability platforms keep data for a period set by your plan and settings, then drop it. The EU AI Act asks deployers of high-risk systems to keep logs for at least six months (Art. 26(6)), and sector rules often ask for longer. Whether your observability retention covers that is a question to check, not assume.
• Exports are your word. A trace exported from any monitoring tool is a file you produced. The recipient cannot tell from the file whether it was changed.
• No independent timestamped signature. A monitoring vendor is a processor acting for you, not a party attesting to your logs to third parties.
• Sampling. High-volume observability setups often sample traces. That is fine for monitoring; for evidence you need the specific run, complete.

What Vetro Attest adds

Vetro Attest takes one run, as an OTLP/JSON trace with OpenTelemetry GenAI conventions or as a native Vetro ledger, and rebuilds it into a hash chain. Verification is free. For 49 USD, one-off, per ledger:

• a full EU AI Act report (Markdown and HTML) mapping the run onto logging obligations under Art. 12, with context on Art. 14, 19 and 26;
• an ed25519 countersignature by this service over the digest, event count and timestamp. Anyone can verify it with our published public key, without an account.

Its limits: the countersignature says the log verified clean at a time, not that the events are true; the report is a structured aid, not legal advice. We keep a paid ledger for 7 days only, and email you the report and attestation to keep.

When to use both

A practical split many teams land on:

• Datadog for everything operational: dashboards, alerts, debugging, cost.
• An OTLP export of the runs that carry weight, such as high-risk decisions, flagged incidents and customer disputes, sent to Vetro Attest for a countersignature soon after they happen.
• Retention storage (WORM) for the exported trace and its attestation, for as long as your obligations require.

If your instrumentation already speaks OpenTelemetry, producing that export for selected runs is usually a small change on the application side. How you do it depends on your setup.

Try it

• Free EU AI Act Art. 12/14 checker: see where your current logging stands.
• Verify a trace free on Vetro Attest, then get the report plus countersignature for 49 USD, no subscription.
• Read more: EU AI Act log retention (Art. 26 and 19).

See a sample ledger verified in one click, check your own logs free or get the countersigned EU AI Act report.