Observability

Cognidesk emits OpenTelemetry spans and metrics from runtime operations, model calls, tool execution, storage-facing operations, and demo telemetry helpers.

Setup

pnpm add @cognidesk/otel

Basic configuration

Start OpenTelemetry once at process boot, before you create the runtime:

import { startCognideskOtel } from "@cognidesk/otel";

const otel = startCognideskOtel({
  serviceName: "my-support-agent",
  serviceVersion: "0.1.0",
  environment: process.env.NODE_ENV ?? "development",
  otlpEndpoint: process.env.OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT,
});

const runtime = createRuntime({
  storage,
  agent,
  models,
  telemetry: {
    content: "redacted",
  },
});

process.once("beforeExit", () => {
  void otel.shutdown();
});

Use telemetry.content: "redacted" unless you intentionally want message, prompt, tool, and knowledge content exported to your telemetry backend.

What's instrumented

Component	Spans	Metrics	Notes
Runtime operations			Includes initialize, create conversation, user turns, events, replay, snapshots, handoff, resume, and compaction
Journey selection and transitions			Uses the configured journey index and runtime state machine
Tool execution			Includes validation, retries, policy blocks, approval handling, and execution results
Knowledge retrieval			Content export depends on telemetry content mode and privacy hooks
Model calls			Includes token usage when providers return it
HTTP/SSE adapter		—	HTTP routing remains outside Core

Demo telemetry

The flight demo can seed synthetic metrics and spans for local Studio dashboards:

import { startCognideskDemoTelemetrySeed } from "@cognidesk/otel";

const seed = startCognideskDemoTelemetrySeed({
  serviceName: "cognidesk-flight-demo",
});

seed.shutdown();

The root demo script also supports OpenTelemetry through environment variables such as COGNIDESK_OTEL=true, COGNIDESK_TELEMETRY_CONTENT=redacted, and OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT=http://127.0.0.1:4318.

Local stack modes

Mode	Command	Includes	Open
Demo only	docker-compose up --build	Flight demo, Studio, Studio operator runtime, MinIO. OTel services are available behind the otel profile.	http://localhost:5173, http://localhost:3000
Studio plus profiled OTel services	docker-compose --profile otel up --build	Demo services plus OpenTelemetry Collector, Tempo, and Prometheus for Studio telemetry sources.	http://localhost:5173, http://localhost:3000, http://localhost:9090, http://localhost:3200
Grafana telemetry demo	docker-compose -f docker-compose.otel.yml up --build	Flight demo, OpenTelemetry Collector, Tempo, Prometheus, Loki, Promtail, and Grafana dashboards. Does not start Studio because Grafana uses port 3000.	http://localhost:3000
Host-network fallback	docker-compose -f docker-compose.otel.host.yml up --build	Grafana telemetry demo with host-oriented endpoints for environments that cannot create Docker bridge networks.	http://localhost:3000

The Studio target manifest points at Prometheus and Tempo. Under compose, deploy/studio/compose-overlay.json rewrites those endpoints from local host URLs to Docker service names.

For the UI layer built on top of conversations, events, dashboard artifacts, and configured telemetry sources, see Studio observability and dashboards.