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Every metric should support a decision. Agree on hardware condition, service readiness, useful work and action responsibility rather than collecting charts for their own sake.
Owners providing GPUs want to understand their machines. Operators need signs of faults and overload. Partners paying operating expenses need explainable costs. Utilization alone cannot answer every question, so define several observation levels before a pilot.
Hardware level
Start with device state and site limits. Temperature, power, hardware events and GPU availability help establish whether agreed work can continue. Metric support depends on hardware and tooling.
NVIDIA DCGM distinguishes health monitoring from active diagnostics. Routine telemetry and a dedicated test should not be treated as equivalent interventions.
Before the pilot, agree who responds to deviations and who can stop workload. An automatic chart does not replace this decision.
Resource level
Memory, compute occupancy, CPU, disk and network help explain constraints. Examine time series rather than one value. Connect them to request composition and environment changes.
For example, memory growth may coincide with longer inputs. This differs from a device suddenly disappearing. Preserve event context so the next specialist does not restart the investigation from scratch.
Do not include others’ document contents in telemetry merely for convenience. Technical metrics and user data need separately defined contents and access.
Service level
Check that the required model is loaded and the endpoint is reachable outside the agreed boundary. A powered-on server may not yet accept requests. Each stage benefits from its own check.
vLLM metrics expose queues and processing time. Choose metrics for the engine version and product. Do not promise owners figures the stack does not actually collect.
Record updates and maintenance events. Otherwise planned readiness reductions resemble unknown faults and make period comparisons unfair.
Incident records should contain detection time, affected node, observed signs and action taken. Even a short consistent log distinguishes recurring problems from isolated events and checks whether maintenance helped.
Useful-result level
Distinguish accepted requests, successful completions, errors and cancellations. Some tasks also need structure or quality checks. One hundred technically returned responses do not necessarily mean one hundred useful results.
Connect these details to reporting interval and resource identifier. Owners can then identify machine work without accessing customer data.
Show financial accrual separately under agreed rules. A technical counter must not quietly become a payment promise.
Action level
For significant signals, record the next step: observe, restrict traffic, remove a node for maintenance or call on-site support. Test the procedure with a safe pilot event.
Continue with access security, network and availability and owner reporting.