Opentelemetry

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.

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

Most AI agent tutorials end at “hello world.” You build a single agent with one or two tools, it answers a few questions, and that is it. The gap between that tutorial and a production system with multiple agents, authentication, observability, and a real frontend is enormous.

Revised with .NET examples — A newer version of this article, covering both Python and .NET, is available as part of the MAF v1: Python and .NET series: MAF v1 — 07-observability-otel.

The exact steps to add Aspire to a running .NET + Angular + PostgreSQL app: two projects, one line in Program.cs, and a project reference.

A production-quality .NET Aspire demo — five microservices, PostgreSQL, Redis, and RabbitMQ, all orchestrated from a single C# AppHost file.