Back to Home9/21/2025, 6:37:04 PM

Bringing Observability to Claude Code: OpenTelemetry in Action

pranay01
51 points
18 comments

Mood

controversial

Sentiment

mixed

Category

tech

Key topics

Observability

OpenTelemetry

AI/ML

Surveillance

Debate intensity80/100

The post discusses bringing observability to Claude Code using OpenTelemetry, sparking a debate about the implications of increased monitoring and surveillance in software development.

Snapshot generated from the HN discussion

Discussion Activity

Active discussion

First comment

23m

Peak period

16

Day 1

Avg / period

6

Comment distribution18 data points

Based on 18 loaded comments

Key moments

  1. 01Story posted

    9/21/2025, 6:37:04 PM

    58d ago

    Step 01
  2. 02First comment

    9/21/2025, 6:59:51 PM

    23m after posting

    Step 02
  3. 03Peak activity

    16 comments in Day 1

    Hottest window of the conversation

    Step 03
  4. 04Latest activity

    9/23/2025, 7:57:00 PM

    56d ago

    Step 04

Generating AI Summary...

Analyzing up to 500 comments to identify key contributors and discussion patterns

Discussion (18 comments)
Showing 18 comments
CuriouslyC
58d ago
2 replies
Kind of amazes me how many people bitch about agent performance but don't hook their guys up to Otel, crack Phoenix and get to work, but instead randomly tweak prompts in response to team vibes.
chrisweekly
58d ago
1 reply
Good point. Also (tangent), I followed your profile link to https://sibylline.dev and am thoroughly impressed. Stoked to have found your treasure trove of repos and insights.
CuriouslyC
58d ago
1 reply
Don't play with them unless you're good at debugging alpha code (claude/codex can do it fine), I haven't ironed out env specific stuff or clarified the installation/usage, and I'm still doing UI polish/optimization passes (yay async simd rust). I'll do showy releases once I've got the tools one click install ready, in the meantime please feel free to drop an issue on any of my projects if there are features or questions you have.
chrisweekly
58d ago
Sounds good, will do. Good luck getting them polished up!
yahoozoo
58d ago
1 reply
Could you elaborate? How does knowing numerical usage metrics help?
CuriouslyC
58d ago
1 reply
With Phoenix + Clickhouse being fed from Otel, you can do queries over your traces for deep analysis. If I want to see which tool calls are failing and why (or just get tool statistics), or find common patterns in flagged/failure traces ("simpler solution") and their causes, it's one query and some wiring.
thewisenerd
58d ago
1 reply
you mention traces

but the documentation only specifies metrics and logs

https://docs.claude.com/en/docs/claude-code/monitoring-usage

am i missing something here? or is this a case where they were lazy to do traces in the claude code sdk, so its logs + log attributes?

CuriouslyC
58d ago
You can get traces out of every agent framework that doesn't suck. You might need to collect from a proxy to get them from Claude because Anthropic is bigtime amateur hour.
oefrha
58d ago
1 reply
Collecting detailed per-request traces and calculating user-specific metrics finer than a total cost feels about as intrusive as one of those periodic screenshot programs forced by really shitty remote jobs or freelancing contracts. It's pretty gross.
pranay01
58d ago
I don't think the primary goal here is "surveillance" but better understanding where in the team are tools like claude code getting adopted, what models are being used, are there best practices to learn in token usage which could make it more efficient
sofia44
58d ago
1 reply
I think this tackles a really important area - nice job. Looking forward to following.
pranay01
58d ago
great to hear. yes, it can help understand how developers are using Claude Code and also optimise token usage etc.
N_Lens
58d ago
1 reply
I’d like to see this leveraged for agent platforms & orchestration rather than for surveillance on human software engineers. Humans don’t perform well in panopticons, but robots do (In my humble opinion).
pranay01
57d ago
1 reply
> leveraged for agent platforms & orchestration

can you share more on what you mean by this?

N_Lens
57d ago
1 reply
Claude Code Agents can be integrated into existing platforms such as github. I can envision agents automatically handling issues with certain tags, or doing pull request reviews, or other such similar trigger based behaviour.

In that kind of orchestration this observability would be invaluable.

pranay01
56d ago
interesting. So, you mean say if an agent is working on automatically doing a PR review, how many such calls to agents are failing, how much time they are taking, etc?

Lot of this you can do with traces today which trace AI specific calls

pdntspa
58d ago
aka let's spy on our devs more than we already are and give their pointy-haired bosses even more leverage to harass them with AI-usage KPI BS
tomrod
58d ago
Very nice!
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ID: 45325410Type: storyLast synced: 11/17/2025, 1:05:27 PM

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