Self-hosted model operations

Self-Hosted Model Evaluation, Capacity, and Observability

Join exact-build quality and safety evaluation, representative load, bounded capacity, privacy-conscious telemetry, cost, and actionable alerts.

Core concept
Review dueNext review due 2026-09-10Content version 0.42.0
Format
Template
Level
Advanced
Audience
Developer, Operator, Leader
Owner
Project42 Editorial
Review cadence
Every 45 days
Prerequisites
A versioned serving-unit manifest and bounded workload claim; Representative routine, important-slice, boundary, adversarial, and failure cases; Service objectives, capacity and cost owners, and a telemetry data policy
01

Evaluate the exact serving build and declared claim

Bind every result to model and tokenizer digests, runtime or image, drivers and execution provider, templates, adapters, gateway, policy, configuration, tool set, evaluation dataset, grader configuration, and time. Predeclare the intended workload, prohibited effects, important slices, metrics, thresholds, critical gates, and human release authority before observing the candidate.

Use deterministic graders for schemas, citations, authorization, limits, tool arguments, and terminal postconditions where possible. Use calibrated blinded human review for usefulness, nuance, accessibility, and consequential judgment. A separately configured model-assisted reviewer can add a versioned signal only after calibration and disagreement analysis; it cannot be the sole judge or release authority.

02

Measure capacity, telemetry, and cost together

Drive the real gateway with a representative distribution of body size, context, output, concurrency, burst, cancellation, timeout, malformed, overload, dependency, and recovery cases. Report latency and first-output distributions, queue time, throughput, rejection and error rates, resource saturation, warm-up, placement, replica behavior, and attributable cost. Issue limits for request, context, output, rate, concurrency, queue, deadline, retry, resources, and budget.

Start telemetry design from operator questions. Correlate secret-safe logs, metrics, and traces across request, policy, gateway, exact build, infrastructure, evaluation reference, cost, and terminal outcome. Control content capture, cardinality, sampling, access, retention, and deletion. Test alert routing, grouping, suppression, runbook action, recovery condition, and telemetry loss so a silent monitoring failure cannot look like a healthy service.

Evaluation and operating decision
text
Task: [MEASURED CLAIM AND RELEASE/OPERATING DECISION]
Scope: [WORKLOAD, IMPORTANT SLICES, PROHIBITED EFFECTS, GATEWAY, BUILD, INFRASTRUCTURE, AND COST]
Permissions: [DATASET, HUMAN REVIEW, MODEL-ASSISTED REVIEW, LOAD, TELEMETRY, COST, AND RELEASE AUTHORITY]
Exact build: [MODEL/TOKENIZER DIGESTS, RUNTIME/IMAGE, DRIVER/PROVIDER, TEMPLATE, ADAPTER, POLICY, CONFIG, TOOLS, AND EVAL]
Evaluation: [CASE/SLICES, GRADERS, CALIBRATION, THRESHOLDS, CRITICAL GATES, RESULTS, AND RESIDUAL RISKS]
Capacity: [LOAD DISTRIBUTION, LATENCY, QUEUE, THROUGHPUT, REJECTION, SATURATION, WARM-UP, LIMITS, AND COST]
Telemetry: [CORRELATION, ALLOWLIST/REDACTION, CARDINALITY, SAMPLING, RETENTION, ALERT, RUNBOOK, AND LOSS DETECTION]
Verification: [REPRODUCE RESULTS, HOLDOUT/REGRESSION, OVERLOAD/FAILURE, ALERT ROUTE, COST ATTRIBUTION, AND HUMAN DISPOSITION]
Stop conditions: [CRITICAL SLICE/EFFECT FAILURE, UNSAFE QUEUE/SATURATION, DATA LEAK, TELEMETRY BLINDNESS, COST LIMIT, OR UNAUTHORIZED RELEASE]
Recovery: [HOLD/STOP TRAFFIC, PRESERVE MINIMAL EVIDENCE, RESTORE KNOWN-GOOD UNIT/LIMITS, VERIFY QUALITY, CAPACITY, TELEMETRY, AND COST]
03

Expected evidence and verification

Expected evidence includes the exact build and claim, versioned cases and slices, grader calibration, case and slice results, critical-gate disposition, representative load profile, distributions and saturation, capacity and cost decision, telemetry data contract, end-to-end correlation, alert and telemetry-loss tests, human approval, owners, residual risks, and expiry or next review date.

Stop release or admission on a critical slice or prohibited effect, uncontrolled queue or saturation, telemetry disclosure or blindness, cost-limit breach, or missing human authority. Hold the candidate, reduce or stop exposure, preserve minimal secret-free evidence, restore the known-good build and operating limits, and verify quality, safety, capacity, alerts, cost, and postconditions before reopening.