Concepts

Transactions

Why the unit of account is a business job, not a tool call.

Cost per call is a number every tool reports and nobody can act on. “You made 190,000 model calls” tells a finance team nothing. “Resolving one support ticket costs $0.41” tells them everything — whether it is worth doing, whether it got worse this month, and what to compare it against.

So the unit of account in Navige is the transaction: one business job, made of however many model calls, tool calls and retries it took.

Opening one

Correlation is opt-in and additive. Send nothing and everything behaves exactly as it would have; send one of these and the calls group themselves.

x-navige-workflow — the stable name for this kind of job, such as support.ticket.triage. Baselines and per-job costs key on this.
x-navige-transaction — your own id for this specific run, used to make retries idempotent rather than counting them twice.
traceparent — a standard W3C trace header. If your stack already emits one, you get correlation with no Navige-specific configuration at all.

bash

curl https://api.navige.ai/proxy/openai/v1/chat/completions \
  -H "x-navige-key: $NAVIGE_KEY" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $OPENAI_API_KEY" \
  -H "x-navige-workflow: support.ticket.triage" \
  -H "x-navige-transaction: ticket-88412" \
  -d @request.json

Both are bounded at 200 characters and rejected rather than truncated if longer — two different 5,000 character names that share a prefix would otherwise register as one job.

Status and outcome are different questions

This trips people up, so it is worth being explicit.

Status is lifecycle: is this job open, closed, abandoned. Navige knows this on its own.
Outcome is judgement: did the job actually achieve what it was for. Navige cannot know this, and does not guess.

An unjudged transaction has no outcome — null, which is not the same as failed. Tell us how it went and the cost-per-successful-job figures become real:

bash

curl -X POST https://api.navige.ai/v1/transactions/$TX_ID/outcome \
  -H "x-navige-key: $NAVIGE_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"succeeded": true}'

Why we will not infer it

A job whose last model call returned HTTP 200 can still have produced a wrong answer, refunded the wrong customer, or closed a ticket that then reopened. Treating 200 as success would make every success rate in the product optimistic by an unknown amount.

What you get from it

Cost per job, and the spread across runs of the same job.
The most expensive workflow you run, which is rarely the one people guess.
Cost per successful job, once outcomes are reported.
A baseline, so a change that doubles the cost of a job shows up as a change rather than noise.