Why OpenTelemetry
It’s the vendor-neutral observability standard. Salesforce Agentforce 3 adopted it for session tracing. Using OTel means your agents’ telemetry works across vendors — no rebuild when you switch platforms.
What to Trace
Spans per: topic classification, tool call, retrieval operation, response generation. Attributes: inputs, outputs, confidence, latency, cost. Parent-child relationships show the full reasoning tree.
Metrics to Emit
Topic hit rate, tool success rate, response latency p50/p95/p99, cost per conversation, token usage. These aggregate into dashboards (Grafana, Datadog, Honeycomb) for operational insight.
Sampling
Full tracing on every conversation is expensive. Sample: 100% on errors, 10% on happy path, 100% during deploys. Adjust based on volume and cost tolerance.