Instrumentation

[Instrumentation][pydantic_ai.capabilities.Instrumentation] is a capability that instruments agent runs with OpenTelemetry tracing: it creates spans for the run itself, each model request, and each tool execution, following the OpenTelemetry Semantic Conventions for Generative AI. Combined with Pydantic Logfire (or any OTel backend), it gives you full visibility into what your agent is doing:

import logfire

from pydantic_ai import Agent
from pydantic_ai.capabilities import Instrumentation

logfire.configure()  # (1)!

agent = Agent('openai:gpt-5.2', capabilities=[Instrumentation()])

1. Sets the global TracerProvider that Instrumentation uses by default. Any OpenTelemetry SDK configuration works too.

Pass [InstrumentationSettings][pydantic_ai.models.instrumented.InstrumentationSettings] via Instrumentation(settings=...) to customize providers, content capture, and the conventions version. To instrument every agent in your application instead of attaching the capability per agent, use [Agent.instrument_all()][pydantic_ai.agent.Agent.instrument_all].

Other capabilities can attach attributes to the created spans through the OpenTelemetry API (opentelemetry.trace.get_current_span().set_attribute(...)).

See Debugging and Monitoring for the full guide: setup, what gets captured, semantic-conventions versions, and excluding sensitive or binary content.