AgentATC Uses OpenTelemetry to Expose Silent Failures in Multi-Agent AI Systems

AgentATC is an open-source project built for the 'Agents of SigNoz' Hackathon (WeMakeDevs × SigNoz, July 2026) that addresses a blind spot in AI observability: multi-agent coordination failures that produce no errors or alerts. The system runs a three-agent workflow — Planner, Executor, and Critic — to generate competitive analysis reports, where every inter-agent handoff is recorded as a first-class OpenTelemetry span. A single shared trace ID links all subtasks, preventing fragmented traces and making the full execution history visible in one connected view. To demonstrate the problem, one subtask is deliberately designed to loop endlessly, as the Executor can never satisfy the Critic's rubric, burning LLM tokens silently without triggering any exception or dashboard alert. AgentATC argues that traditional observability tools measure latency, errors, and cost per call, but are not designed to detect coordination breakdowns between agents.