Anthropic adds OpenTelemetry tracing to the Claude Platform in public beta

Anthropic opened the public beta on 14 October. OpenTelemetry is a vendor-neutral standard for monitoring data: each request produces a trace, made of spans, one for every step such as a model call or a tool use. Because Claude’s spans use OpenTelemetry’s naming conventions for generative AI, tools that follow them recognise the data with no extra configuration.

There are two ways to collect traces. An admin adds a destination in the Claude Console, and the API sends spans for Messages API requests and for each Claude Managed Agents turn, model run and server tool. The Claude SDK, in Python, TypeScript, C#, Go, Java, PHP and Ruby, adds spans for tools the application runs itself.

By default, spans carry IDs, timing, status, token counts and the names of agents and tools. A Full content mode adds prompts and responses, but organisations with HIPAA, FERPA or K-12 restrictions get only metadata at Console destinations.

Anthropic lists 12 partner tools, including Datadog, Grafana Cloud, Honeycomb, New Relic and Sentry, and any tool with a standard OTLP endpoint works. API tracing runs on the Claude Platform and Claude Platform on AWS. Delivery is best effort, so Anthropic points to its Usage API for complete usage counts. Neither the announcement nor the docs mention a charge.