Observability with OpenTelemetry

[metaskills]

I've seen project such as this one which leverage Claude Agent SDK hooks to create what I suspect are OpenTelemetry spans.

https://github.com/disler/claude-code-hooks-multi-agent-observability?tab=readme-ov-file

OpenTelemetry itself (https://opentelemetry.io/ecosystem/integrations/) lists this page and references Claude Code.

https://code.claude.com/docs/en/monitoring-usage

# 1. Enable telemetry
export CLAUDE_CODE_ENABLE_TELEMETRY=1

Ultimately I'd like to deploy Claude Agents using the SDK to my own hosting (https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/agent-sdk/hosting) and use Langfuse for my telemetry provider. But not finding a lot of documentation on which way to go here (hooks with manual work or env vars automatically) and thought I would ask here.

[metaskills]

Via some testing, it seems the answer is no, the CLAUDE_CODE_ENABLE_TELEMETRY does not work with the Agent SDK and even if it did, spans are not supported. That means we are left to implement OTel using hooks and custom code. That sound right?

[Danm72]

Just an FYI I've gotten Braintrust to work well for observing

[metaskills]

@Danm72 For the Agent SDK? Did you use hooks?

[Danm72]

For the SDK yes, I'll check and get back to you