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Suggestion: add WFGY 16-problem RAG failure taxonomy as an analysis layer for OpenLLMetry traces #3743

@onestardao

Description

@onestardao

Hi Traceloop team,

OpenLLMetry gives teams great visibility into LLM applications with OpenTelemetry, and many of those applications are RAG or RAG+agent pipelines.

I maintain WFGY RAG 16 Problem Map, an MIT-licensed project that focuses on classifying and fixing RAG / LLM failures at the pipeline level.

Repo (MIT):
https://github.com/onestardao/WFGY

Main RAG failure map page:
https://github.com/onestardao/WFGY/tree/main/ProblemMap/README.md

WFGY provides:

  • A 16-class RAG failure taxonomy (retrieval, prompt, structure, infra)
  • A triage prompt that takes a failing trace (Q, retrieved context, tool calls, answer, logs) and assigns one of those labels
  • For each class, concrete structural fix suggestions

The same map is already integrated or cited by:

  • RAGFlow and LlamaIndex in their RAG troubleshooting docs
  • ToolUniverse – Harvard MIMS Lab, which wraps it in an incident triage tool
  • Rankify – University of Innsbruck and Multimodal RAG Survey – QCRI LLM Lab
  • Curated resources like Awesome LLM Apps and Awesome Data Science – academic

Proposal

Add WFGY’s 16-problem map as an optional, documented analysis layer on top of OpenLLMetry traces. For example:

  1. A short example or recipe that:

    • Filters traces for failing RAG interactions.
    • Extracts relevant fields (input, retrieved context, tool calls, output).
    • Calls the WFGY triage prompt and records a rag_failure_type attribute per trace.
  2. Documentation that explains:

    • The 16 failure types at a high level.
    • How to slice and visualize OpenLLMetry data by rag_failure_type in common backends (Grafana, Datadog, etc.).

This would make it easier for teams to move from raw traces to a structured understanding of “what kind of RAG failures” they are seeing.

If you consider this useful, I’m happy to propose a small example and doc text in a PR.

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