Observability

How to see what an AI agent actually did: the OpenTelemetry GenAI span tree, wired into Azure Monitor, from the agent runtime through the APIM AI gateway and across the MCP boundary — with the copy-paste KQL and the gotchas that will cost you an afternoon.

A model can only generate text. The harness is the loop around it that calls tools, manages context, gates actions, and decides when to stop.

Run MAF DevUI locally to test prompts, inspect tool calls and OTel spans, and register agents by code or directory discovery.

Wire OpenTelemetry spans for agent runs with GenAI attributes, using console export for dev and OTLP for production tracing.

Revised with .NET examples — A newer version of this article, covering both Python and .NET, is available as part of the MAF v1: Python and .NET series: MAF v1 — 07-observability-otel.