Cheat sheet

Production traces

From lesson 0018. One id through HTTP, the agent, the tools, and the world.

1. CorrelateSame id on the request, spans, and mutations.
2. SpanUnit of work with a parent. Nest the loop.
3. ReadOpen the tree. Grade the world, not the chat.

Not

• Not three log files with three ids. That is not a path.
• Not a vendor APM. OpenTelemetry is the interchange.
• Not an eval suite — that samples these trees next. Eval suites. Floor: evals.
• Not default full-prompt capture in prod. Opt-in debug.

Who mints

• The SDK at the first hop with no traceparent — not the LLM.
• Context lives in RAM for the request; spans go to your backend; Stripe/SQL only if you copy the id.
• The agent inherits the bag only if your harness keeps it (in-process or inject on HTTP).

OTel: a trace is the path of a request. Anthropic: outcome ≠ last sentence. Put request_id on Stripe and SQL.