Cognigy.AI gateway rejecting retries despite local budget counter showing 80% usage

We’re pushing schedule generation prompts through a custom Python wrapper for the NICE Cognigy.AI LLM gateway. The token consumption tracking is drifting. Budgets are set per dialog session, but the gateway returns a 429 Too Many Requests before the limit actually hits zero. The drift happens during high-load windows. Latency spikes mess up the local counter sync.

Here’s the snippet handling the truncation:

if current_tokens > BUDGET_THRESHOLD:
 payload['system_instruction'] = LIGHTWEIGHT_VARIANT
 truncate_history(payload, keep_last_n=3)

The dynamic prompt truncation isn’t triggering fast enough. We’re seeing 408 Request Timeout errors when the payload size spikes. Caching frequent user intents to bypass inference didn’t help. The adaptive backoff strategy is too aggressive. It kills the session before the retry window opens. The session ID gets invalidated on the server side.

The JSON payload looks standard:

{
 "session_id": "sch_gen_9921",
 "budget_remaining": 450,
 "context_window": "compact"
}

Aggregating token usage metrics for cost allocation is blocked. The gateway logs aren’t exposing the granular counts. Is there a specific header we’re missing on the /api/v2/cognigy/llm/invoke call? Or does the budget monitoring endpoint return stale data? We polled it every second and the values jump erratically.

Input sanitization filters for prompt injection are solid. The problem is purely on the budget side.

  1. Swap system instruction.
  2. Truncate.
  3. Retry with backoff.

The backoff calc is min(base * (2 ** attempt), max_delay). It’s working, but the gateway rejects the retry anyway. Logs show budget_exceeded even though our counter says we’re at 80%. The counter is local. Gateway thinks different.

Hi all,

That token consumption is… tricky. We see similar issues with the embeddable framework, actually. It’s not always the SDK side.

The 429 error means the gateway is rate-limiting, right? But the counter shows usage is still below the limit. It sounds like the latency is throwing off your local tracking. Maybe the gateway is counting tokens faster than your Python wrapper updates?

Try adding sdk.agentDesktop.attachContext before the call to Cognigy. It helps sync some states. I think it could help with the timing.

const handleToolCall = (payload: any) => {
 sdk.agentDesktop.attachContext(payload.correlationId);
 // call Cognigy here
};

It’s a bit of a hack, but it forces the SDK to re-evaluate the context. I’m not sure if Cognigy exposes some sort of event for token consumption. That would be ideal, so you can sync the counter on the gateway side.

Also, double-check if you’re counting the prompt and the response tokens. It’s easy to forget one. We had this problem with the screen pop - we were only tracking the initial event.

I have some logs, but it cuts off… maybe it’s relevant?

...
[2024-02-29 14:32:15.123] INFO: Sending prompt to Cognigy
[2024-02-29 14:32:15.124] DEBUG: Local token counter: 75%
[2024-02-29 14:32:15.888] ERROR: 429 Too Many Requests
[2024-02-29 14:32:15.889] DEBUG: Local token counter: 80%
...

The timing seems off.

The 429 error - it’s not always the token count itself, but the scoring.

We’ve seen precision drops when the gateway’s sentiment calibration is off, similar to what was discussed in the SIP trunk thread. Maybe the scoring adds to the token usage faster than you track? Is the gateway logging token counts per phrase?

Also, what is the refresh rate of the local budget counter?