TL;DR
Many LLM observability setups capture prompts, outputs, tokens, and latency while leaving retrieval failures hidden.
A single search call may conceal query rewriting, filtering, fetching, deduplication, reranking, and evidence selection.
A useful trace connects the original question to the effective query, returned sources, selected passages, and final claims.
Retrieval tracing helps distinguish missing, stale, or ignored evidence from a genuine generation failure.
Production...