Exa Operational Telemetry

Overview

Instrument Exa calls with content-free metrics, traces, cost, and asynchronous lifecycle signals that support diagnosis without logging retrieved text. Treat credentials, queries, retrieved content, generated output, spend, and destructive state as separately governed boundaries.

Prerequisites

• The target repository, environment, Exa team, product surface, and accountable owner.
• The workload's data classification, latency and freshness promise, cost ceiling, and retention policy.
• Current first-party documentation plus credentials only for a narrowly approved live check.

Current Contract

Exa responses expose request IDs and often costDollars; errors expose status and tags; Contents exposes per-URL statuses. Agent, Monitor, Webset, and Batch operations add IDs, states, queues, events, and terminal outcomes that must be reconciled separately.

Authentication

For normal REST work, inject EXA_API_KEY from an approved server-side secret manager and send it only as Authorization: Bearer to the configured first-party Exa API host. Team Management service keys, hosted MCP OAuth or enterprise managed authorization, and payment-protocol calls are separate trust models. Never print, commit, place in a URL, or expose a credential to an untrusted client.