Ongoing Retainer

Managed AI Operations — the care an AI system needs after launch day.

Shipping is the beginning, not the end. We monitor drift, cost, and reliability continuously, respond to incidents against a defined runbook, and report monthly — so quality doesn't quietly decay after the team that built it moves on.

See the case study ↓
99.9%Uptime SLA
WeeklyCost tracking
<1hrIncident response*
All evals passing
elhaa · operations dashboard
1Production AI System
2Continuous Monitoring (Drift, Cost, Errors)
3Alert & Runbook Trigger
4On-Call Response & Monthly Report
SLA-backed response
What's included

A complete operations layer, not a dashboard nobody watches.

Monitoring, runbooks, and reporting — the full system that keeps a production AI system healthy after launch.

Continuous drift & quality monitoring

Ongoing evaluation catching accuracy decay before users notice, not after complaints.

02

Cost tracking & optimisation

Weekly spend tracked against a budget model, with alerts before overruns and recommendations to cut waste.

03

Incident runbooks & on-call response

Defined detection, escalation, and response steps with a named engineer and an SLA.

04

Monthly operational reporting

A clear, leadership-readable report on uptime, cost, quality, and incidents.

05

Quarterly re-audits

Periodic re-evaluation as your data, usage, and the underlying models change.

Engineering deep dive

How it's actually run.

The monitoring topology and a real alerting pattern — not a slide about “AI operations.”

1Production AI System (Yours or Ours)
2Continuous Monitoring: Drift, Cost, Latency, Errors
3Alert Triggered Against Defined Thresholds
4Runbook Execution & On-Call Response
ops-monitor.ts
// elhaa Operations Monitor — Alert Rule
const rule = elhaaOps.defineAlert({
  metric: 'eval_pass_rate',
  threshold: 0.93,
  window: '24h',
  onBreach: 'page-oncall',
  runbook: 'accuracy-degradation-v2'
});
Case study

Six Months of Zero-Surprise Operations

Financial services · Regional bank

The challenge

An internal AI system was running in production with no monitoring beyond “users will tell us if something breaks” — and inference costs had crept up 40% over two quarters unnoticed.

The approach

We audited the system, stood up drift and cost monitoring wired to Slack alerts, documented incident runbooks with the internal team, and began monthly reporting with a quarterly re-audit cadence.

Production system → continuous monitoring → alert thresholds → runbook response → monthly report
34%Inference cost reduced
0Unplanned outages in 6mo
<45minAvg incident response

*Illustrative example based on a representative engagement.

The difference

The typical approach vs the elhaa approach.

Typical approach
With elhaa
Monitoring
Nobody notices until a user complains
Drift, cost, and errors caught before users notice
Cost control
Inference spend discovered on the invoice
Budget tracked weekly with alerts on creep
Incidents
Ad-hoc firefighting, no playbook
A defined runbook and on-call response
Ownership
Falls on whoever built it, if they're still around
A named team with an SLA, ongoing
How the engagement runs

Four steps from audit to ongoing care.

1

Operational audit

Assess what's currently monitored, what isn't, and where the real risk sits.

2

Set up monitoring

Stand up drift, cost, latency, and error dashboards wired to your alerting channels.

3

Define runbooks & SLA

Document incident response steps and agree response-time commitments.

4

Operate & report

Ongoing monitoring, monthly reporting, and quarterly reviews as the system evolves.

How success is measured

Agreed in week one, on a dashboard by go-live.

Reliability

Uptime & P95 latency

Tracked against an agreed SLA, not just “it seemed fine.”

Cost

Spend vs forecast

Weekly tracking against a budget model, with alerts before overruns.

Quality

Drift detection

Accuracy decay caught by ongoing evaluation, not by user complaints.

Response

Time to incident resolution

Measured against the agreed runbook response-time commitment.

Works with your tools

Typical systems & standards.

Datadog & GrafanaPagerDuty & OpsgenieOpenTelemetryCost dashboards (custom)Your existing cloud providerSlack/Teams alerting
Who's involved

Small teams on both sides.

From elhaa
  • Ops leadOwns the monitoring setup and monthly reporting.
  • On-call engineerResponds to incidents per the agreed runbook and SLA.
  • Cost analystTracks spend against forecast and flags optimisation opportunities.
From your side
  • System ownerReviews monthly reports and approves runbook changes.
  • On-call counterpartYour engineer paired for incidents requiring internal context.
  • Finance contactReviews cost reporting and budget alerts.
FAQ

Questions about Managed AI Operations.

No — we take on AI systems built in-house or by other vendors. The operational audit at the start tells us exactly what we're inheriting before we commit to an SLA.

Pilot to Production is a one-time hardening engagement. Managed AI Operations is the ongoing care afterward — many clients do both, in sequence.

The agreed runbook defines detection, escalation, and response steps, with a named on-call engineer and a response-time commitment — not an ad-hoc scramble.

Yes — it's a retainer, not a lock-in. We document everything so an internal team can take over cleanly whenever you're ready.

A monthly retainer scoped to the number and complexity of systems under management, agreed upfront with no surprise overages.

Sounds like your situation?

A 30-minute call. We'll tell you honestly whether this is the right solution — and what it would take.

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