genai-toolbox/docs/telemetry/telemetry.md

Telemetry for Toolbox

Telemetry data such as logs, metrics, and traces will help developers understand the internal state of the system.

Toolbox exports telemetry data of logs via standard out/err, and traces/metrics through OpenTelemetry. Additional flags can be passed to Toolbox to enable different logging behavior, or to export metrics through a specific exporter.

Logging

Logging format

Toolbox supports both text and structured logging format.

The text logging (also the default logging format) outputs log as string:

2024-11-12T15:08:11.451377-08:00 INFO "Initialized 0 sources.\n"

The structured logging outputs log as JSON:

{
  "timestamp":"2024-11-04T16:45:11.987299-08:00",
  "severity":"ERROR",
  "logging.googleapis.com/sourceLocation":{...},
  "message":"unable to parse tool file at \"tools.yaml\": \"cloud-sql-postgres1\" is not a valid kind of data source"
}

Note

logging.googleapis.com/sourceLocation shows the source code location information associated with the log entry, if any.

Log level

Toolbox supports four log levels, including Debug, Info, Warn, and Error. Toolbox will only output logs that are equal or more severe to the level that it is set. Below are the log levels that Toolbox supports in the order of severity.

Log level	Description
Debug	Debug logs typically contain information that is only useful during the debugging phase and may be of little value during production.
Info	Info logs include information about successful operations within the application, such as a successful start, pause, or exit of the application.
Warn	Warning logs are slightly less severe than error conditions. While it does not cause an error, it indicates that an operation might fail in the future if action is not taken now.
Error	Error log is assigned to event logs that contain an application error message.

Logging Configurations

The following flags can be used to customize Toolbox logging:

Flag	Description
--log-level	Preferred log level, allowed values: debug, info, warn, error. Default: info.
--logging-format	Preferred logging format, allowed values: standard, json. Default: standard.

Example:

./toolbox --tools_file "tools.yaml" --log-level warn --logging-format json

Telemetry

Metrics

A metric is a measurement of a service captured at runtime. The collected data can be used to provide important insights into the service. Toolbox provides the following custom metrics:

Metric Name	Description
toolbox.server.toolset.get.count	Counts the number of toolset manifest requests served
toolbox.server.tool.get.count	Counts the number of tool manifest requests served
toolbox.server.tool.get.invoke	Counts the number of tool invocation requests served

All custom metrics have the following attributes/labels:

Metric Attributes	Description
toolbox.name	Name of the toolset or tool, if applicable.
toolbox.status	Operation status code, for example: success, failure.

Traces

Trace is a tree of spans that shows the path that a request makes through an application.

Spans generated by Toolbox server is prefixed with toolbox/server/. For example, when user run Toolbox, it will generate spans for the following, with toolbox/server/init as the root span:

Exporter

Exporter is responsible for processing and exporting telemetry data. Toolbox generates telemetry data within the OpenTelemetry Protocol (OTLP), and user can choose to use exporters that are designed to support the OpenTelemetry Protocol. Within Toolbox, we provide two types of exporter implementation to choose from, either the Google Cloud Exporter that will send data directly to the backend, or the OTLP Exporter along with a Collector that will act as a proxy to collect and export data to the telemetry backend of user's choice.

Google Cloud Exporter

The Google Cloud Exporter directly exports telemetry to Google Cloud Monitoring. It utilizes the GCP Metric Exporter and GCP Trace Exporter.

Note

If you're using Google Cloud Monitoring, the following APIs will need to be enabled. For instructions on how to enable APIs, see this guide:

• logging.googleapis.com
• monitoring.googleapis.com
• cloudtrace.googleapis.com

OTLP Exporter

This implementation uses the default OTLP Exporter over HTTP for metrics and traces. You can use this exporter if you choose to export your telemetry data to a Collector.

Collector

A collector acts as a proxy between the application and the telemetry backend. It receives telemetry data, transforms it, and then exports data to backends that can store it permanently. Toolbox provide an option to export telemetry data to user's choice of backend(s) that are compatible with the Open Telemetry Protocol (OTLP). If you would like to use a collector, please refer to this guide.

Telemetry Configurations

The following flags are used to determine Toolbox's telemetry configuration:

flag	type	description
--telemetry-gcp	bool	Enable exporting directly to Google Cloud Monitoring. Default is false.
--telemetry-otlp	string	Enable exporting using OpenTelemetry Protocol (OTLP) to the specified endpoint (e.g. 'http://127.0.0.1:4318').
--telemetry-service-name	string	Sets the value of the service.name resource attribute. Default is toolbox.

In addition to the flags noted above, you can also make additional configuration for OpenTelemetry via the General SDK Configuration through environmental variables.

Example usage

To enable Google Cloud Exporter:

./toolbox --telemetry-gcp

To enable OTLP Exporter, provide Collector endpoint:

./toolbox --telemetry-otlp=http://127.0.0.1:4553

Resource Attribute

All metrics and traces generated within Toolbox will be associated with a unified resource. The list of resource attributes included are:

Resource Name	Description
TelemetrySDK	TelemetrySDK version info.
OS	OS attributes including OS description and OS type.
Container	Container attributes including container ID, if applicable.
Host	Host attributes including host name.
SchemaURL	Sets the schema URL for the configured resource.
service.name	Open telemetry service name. Defaulted to toolbox. User can set the service name via flag mentioned above to distinguish between different toolbox service.
service.version	The version of Toolbox used.