Trace Analysis
definition
Examining the full sequence of agent decisions, tool calls, inputs, outputs, and intermediate results to understand and debug agent behavior. Traces are the primary debugging tool for agent systems, revealing exactly where reasoning went wrong, why a particular tool was selected, or why a tool call returned unexpected data — without them, agent failures are opaque black boxes.
Examining the full sequence of agent decisions, tool calls, inputs, outputs, and intermediate results to understand and debug agent behavior. Traces are the primary debugging tool for agent systems, revealing exactly where reasoning went wrong, why a particular tool was selected, or why a tool call returned unexpected data — without them, agent failures are opaque black boxes. Structured trace analysis turns non-deterministic agent failures into understandable, fixable issues by providing a complete audit trail of every step the agent took. In production, traces also enable performance profiling, identifying which tool calls are slow, which reasoning steps waste tokens, and where the agent gets stuck in loops. This concept connects to observability platforms for the infrastructure that captures and visualizes traces, the ReAct pattern which produces the think-act-observe traces being analyzed, and quality metrics for defining what "good" behavior looks like in trace data.