OpenEvidence Observability

Overview

OpenEvidence delivers clinical evidence queries where response accuracy and freshness have direct patient safety implications. Monitor query response times to ensure clinicians get timely answers, track evidence freshness to catch stale citations, and audit every query for compliance. Observability must also verify citation accuracy and maintain complete audit logs for regulatory requirements (HIPAA, clinical decision support standards).

Key Metrics

Instrumentation

async function trackClinicalQuery(queryType: string, fn: () => Promise<any>) {
  const start = Date.now();
  const traceId = crypto.randomUUID();
  try {
    const result = await fn();
    metrics.histogram('openevidence.query.latency', Date.now() - start, { queryType });
    metrics.increment('openevidence.query.total', { queryType });
    auditLog.record({ traceId, queryType, status: 'ok', latency: Date.now() - start });
    return result;
  } catch (err) {
    metrics.increment('openevidence.query.errors', { queryType, error: err.code });
    auditLog.record({ traceId, queryType, status: 'error', error: err.message });
    throw err;
  }
}

Health Check Dashboard

async function openEvidenceHealth(): Promise<Record<string, string>> {
  const latencyP95 = await metrics.query('openevidence.query.latency', 'p95', '5m');
  const errorRate = await metrics.query('openevidence.query.error_rate', 'avg', '5m');
  const freshness = await openEvAdmin.getMedianEvidenceAge();
  return {
    query_latency: latencyP95 < 3000 ? 'healthy' : 'slow',
    error_rate: errorRate < 0.005 ? 'healthy' : 'degraded',
    evidence_freshness: freshness < 7 ? 'healthy' : 'stale',
  };
}

Alerting Rules

const alerts = [
  { metric: 'openevidence.query.latency_p95', condition: '> 8s', window: '10m', severity: 'warning' },
  { metric: 'openevidence.query.error_rate', condition: '> 0.02', window: '5m', severity: 'critical' },
  { metric: 'openevidence.evidence.median_age_days', condition: '> 30', window: '1d', severity: 'warning' },
  { metric: 'openevidence.audit.completeness', condition: '< 0.999', window: '1h', severity: 'critical' },
];

Structured Logging

function logClinicalEvent(event: string, data: Record<string, any>) {
  console.log(JSON.stringify({
    service: 'openevidence', event,
    query_type: data.queryType, duration_ms: data.latency,
    citation_count: data.citations, evidence_age_days: data.evidenceAge,
    // HIPAA: never log patient identifiers or query text
    trace_id: data.traceId, audit_seq: data.auditSeq,
    timestamp: new Date().toISOString(),
  }));
}

Error Handling

Resources

• OpenEvidence

Next Steps

See openevidence-incident-runbook.