Strands Agents

Strands emits GenAI spans of its own and sets up the exporter for you. Python.

Turn tracing on

pip install 'strands-agents[otel]'

Set the exporter variables from OpenTelemetry, then once at startup:

from strands.telemetry import StrandsTelemetry

StrandsTelemetry().setup_otlp_exporter()

What is recorded

• Each model call, with its model and tokens, cached tokens included.
• Each tool call.
• A model call that fails, as failed.
• The agent's own span carries the run's totals and is not counted again.

Strands names itself, not the provider, on its spans, so the provider is told from the model name: gpt-, o1 to o4, claude-, gemini-, sonar and Bedrock ids such as us.anthropic.claude-…. A model named any other way is recorded unpriced.

Checked with Strands Agents 1.60.

Budgets

Spans arrive after the call, so spend counts against your budgets and raises alerts, but a budget cannot stop a call recorded this way.