LLM Observability with Instana and OpenLLMetry

With Instana, you can export directly to an Instana Agent in your cluster.

The Instana Agent will report back the tracing and metrics to the Instana Backend and display them on the Instana UI.

If you are running your Instana Agent on a VM or physical machine, do the following to config:

Edit the agent config file configuration.yaml under the /opt/instana/agent/etc/instana folder.

cd /opt/instana/agent/etc/instana
vi configuration.yaml

Add the following to the file:

com.instana.plugin.opentelemetry:
  enabled: true
  grpc:
    enabled: true

Restart the Instana agent:

systemctl restart instana-agent.service

If you are running Instana Agent on OpenShift or Kubernetes, do the following to config:

In Instana Configmap, add the following content:

com.instana.plugin.opentelemetry:
  enabled: true
  grpc:
    enabled: true

For Instana Daemonset, add the following:

- mountPath: /opt/instana/agent/etc/instana/configuration-opentelemetry.yaml
  name: configuration
  subPath: configuration-opentelemetry.yaml

The Instana agent should be ready for OpenTelemetry data at port 4317.

Then, set this env var, and you’re done!

TRACELOOP_BASE_URL=<instana-agent-hostname>:4317

Instana now supports MCP Observability. The following span attributes are available for MCP traces : mcp.method.name mcp.request.argument mcp.request.id mcp.response.value mcp.session.init_options

Here is the MCP traces from Instana UI: