Artificial Intelligence
Agent observability with OpenTelemetry GenAI semconv in 2026
The OTel GenAI spec stabilizes attributes for LLMs, tools, and agents. Practical Python implementation with Anthropic + Grafana Tempo.
Tag
opentelemetry
Technology
Observability tools I would recommend in 2026
After a decade of Prometheus, three years of consolidation around OpenTelemetry, and the open stack now mature with Grafana, Loki, and Tempo, concrete recommendations for teams starting or reviewing their observability layer: what fits, what is excess, and what to avoid.
Artificial Intelligence
AI agent observability: what to instrument first
Agents that chain calls to models, tools and memory are hard to debug without instrumentation designed for them. After a long year running agents in production, I cover what to measure first, which standards are consolidating, and which costly mistakes are avoided by getting the traces right from the start.
Technology
Grafana Beyla: Auto-Instrumentation Without Touching Code
Grafana Beyla is an eBPF agent that automatically instruments existing applications without touching their code: it observes kernel syscalls and generates OpenTelemetry traces and RED metrics for services written in Go, Java, Python, Node, and Rust. It gives broad, immediate coverage, but it does not replace the manual SDK for business metrics and internal logic.
Architecture
OpenTelemetry: Stable Logs for Complete Telemetry
OpenTelemetry declared logs signals stable in July 2024. The third pillar of modern observability finally joins metrics and traces under a single protocol and a shared data model.
Architecture
OpenTelemetry: Unifying Logs, Metrics, and Traces
OpenTelemetry is the CNCF project, graduated in May 2026, that unifies logs, metrics, and traces under one SDK and the OTLP protocol, without locking you into a single backend. Traces have been stable since 2021 and metrics since 2023; logs are still maturing, but already worth adopting on new projects.