Observing agentic AI workflows with Grafana Cloud, OpenTelemetry, and the OpenAI Agents SDK

As the use of agentic AI applications expands, integrating multi-step reasoning, tool execution, and autonomous decision-making into a single workflow, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) teams require new tools to gain visibility into the performance and behavior of these agents. The OpenAI Agents SDK, a framework for creating agentic applications, includes built-in tracing capabilities to capture detailed agent activity, which can be exported to Grafana Cloud Traces using OpenTelemetry for enhanced analysis. This process involves setting up a sample application, such as a "tutor" app with triage, math, and history agents, and configuring a custom OpenTelemetry tracing processor to send traces to Grafana Cloud. This setup allows developers to visualize and analyze traces for deeper insights into agent workflows and troubleshoot issues efficiently. Additionally, Grafana Cloud Traces offers tools like TraceQL for querying trace data, enabling rich analysis of agent workflows, with the capability to correlate traces with metrics and logs for faster root cause analysis. The article highlights the extensibility of the OpenAI Agents SDK and emphasizes the benefits of using Grafana Cloud for centralized telemetry visualization and analysis, promoting the platform's ease of use and flexible pricing plans.