OpenTelemetry

Agent Gateway natively supports OpenTelemetry (OTLP) for distributed tracing and metrics export.

Configuration

Enable OpenTelemetry tracing in your Agent Gateway configuration:

config:
  tracing:
    otlpEndpoint: http://localhost:4317
    randomSampling: true

Configuration options

With Jaeger

Run Jaeger with OTLP support:

docker run -d --name jaeger \
  -p 16686:16686 \
  -p 4317:4317 \
  jaegertracing/all-in-one:latest

Configure Agent Gateway:

config:
  tracing:
    otlpEndpoint: http://localhost:4317
    randomSampling: true

binds:
- port: 3000
  listeners:
  - routes:
    - backends:
      - mcp:
          targets:
          - name: my-server
            stdio:
              cmd: npx
              args: ["@modelcontextprotocol/server-everything"]

View traces at http://localhost:16686.

With OpenTelemetry Collector

For production deployments, use the OpenTelemetry Collector:

# otel-collector-config.yaml
receivers:
  otlp:
    protocols:
      grpc:
        endpoint: 0.0.0.0:4317

processors:
  batch:

exporters:
  jaeger:
    endpoint: jaeger:14250
    tls:
      insecure: true

service:
  pipelines:
    traces:
      receivers: [otlp]
      processors: [batch]
      exporters: [jaeger]

Trace attributes

Agent Gateway includes the following attributes in traces:

• http.method - HTTP request method
• http.url - Request URL
• http.status_code - Response status code
• mcp.method - MCP method name (for MCP requests)
• mcp.session_id - MCP session ID
• gen_ai.operation.name - AI operation type (for LLM requests)
• gen_ai.request.model - Requested model
• gen_ai.usage.input_tokens - Input token count
• gen_ai.usage.output_tokens - Output token count

Learn more