Why You Need Tracing for Agents
Agents take multiple LLM calls and tool calls per request — without traces you're flying blind.
Agents Are Hard to Debug
A single user message can trigger 10 LLM calls, 5 tool calls, and 30 seconds of latency. When something goes wrong, "the agent gave a weird answer" tells you nothing.
Tracing is how you see what actually happened.
What a Trace Captures
For one user request:
- Every LLM call: model, messages in, response out, tokens, latency
- Every tool call: name, args, result, error
- The order and timing of all steps
- The final user-visible answer
All lessons in this course
- Why You Need Tracing for Agents
- Logging Tool Calls and Inputs/Outputs
- Latency and Cost per Step
- Visualising Agent Runs (Langfuse, LangSmith)