# AI gateway best practices: Model routing, reliability, and budget controls for production agents

DevFeed: [AI gateway best practices: Model routing, reliability, and budget controls for production agents](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/ai-gateway-best-practices-model-routing-reliability-and-budget-controls-for-production-agents-2227.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<https://www.datadoghq.com/blog/ai-gateways-best-practices/>)

Author: Thomas Sobolik

Published: 2026-07-23T00:00:00Z

Content type: tutorial

Language: en

Sources: [Datadog | The Monitor blog](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/datadog-the-monitor-blog.md>)

Topics: [AI, ML & Data Engineering](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/ai-ml-data-engineering.md>), [LLM evaluation / benchmarking](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/llm-evaluation-benchmarking.md>), [ai observability](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/ai-observability.md>), [Azure OpenAI](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/azure-openai.md>)

Tags: [agent-observability](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/agent-observability.md>), [agents](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/agents.md>), [ai-gateway](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/ai-gateway.md>), [ai-observability](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/ai-observability.md>), [benchmarking](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/benchmarking.md>), [cost](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/cost.md>), [llm](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/llm.md>), [monitor](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/monitor.md>), [observability](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/observability.md>), [production](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/production.md>), [routing](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/routing.md>)

## AI overview

The article explains how AI gateways centralize access to multiple LLM providers for production agents. It focuses on model routing and evaluation, reliability controls such as retries and fallbacks, and budget governance.

## Source excerpt

Learn how AI gateways help you scale your agents to consume multiple LLM services reliably, and how to monitor these systems to ensure you're getting the best performance and cost.