Agent activity metrics¶

Supported in ADKPython v1.32.0

Agent Development Kit (ADK) provides built-in, vendor-neutral metrics collection to help you understand the performance, cost, and usage patterns of your agents. While logs provide a detailed narrative of what happened, metrics give you aggregated, quantitative data to answer how often and how fast things are happening.

Metrics philosophy¶

ADK's approach to metrics is designed to be lightweight, standardized, and entirely agnostic to your choice of monitoring backend.

OpenTelemetry Semantic Conventions: ADK implements the OpenTelemetry (OTel) Semantic Conventions for GenAI. This ensures that metrics are recorded under standard, predictable attribute and metric names.
OTLP Wire Format: ADK emits data using the standard OTLP format, ensuring that your metrics will seamlessly integrate into any OTel-compatible backend (e.g., Prometheus, Datadog, SigNoz, Google Cloud Monitoring).
Cost and Performance Focused: Metrics are significantly less costly and more performant than logs or traces when performing analytics over large swathes of data. ADK tracks the most critical signals for LLM applications: token consumption, request latency, and tool execution reliability.
Vendor-Neutral Export: ADK does not lock you into a specific metrics pipeline. You instantiate standard OTel meter providers and export data wherever your infrastructure demands.

Metrics schema¶

When metrics are enabled, ADK automatically instruments the agent's lifecycle, workflow steps, and tool executions based on the OpenTelemetry GenAI Semantic Conventions. The following core metrics are emitted:

Metric Name	Type	Description	Key Attributes (Dimensions)
`gen_ai.agent.invocation.duration`	Histogram	The total time taken for an agent to process a prompt and return a response.	`gen_ai.agent.name`, `error.type`
`gen_ai.tool.execution.duration`	Histogram	The execution latency of individual tools called by the agent. Useful for spotting slow external APIs.	`gen_ai.tool.name`, `error.type`
`gen_ai.agent.request.size`	Histogram	The size or complexity of the incoming request sent to the agent.	`gen_ai.agent.name`
`gen_ai.agent.response.size`	Histogram	The size or complexity of the final response generated by the agent.	`gen_ai.agent.name`
`gen_ai.agent.workflow.steps`	Histogram	Tracks the number of iterative steps or reasoning loops an agent takes to complete a workflow.	`gen_ai.agent.name`

Metrics export setup¶

Metrics export in ADK Web¶

If you are running your agent using the adk web or adk api_server CLI commands, you can configure metrics export.

OTLP export¶

To export metrics to an OTLP-compatible backend, set the standard OTel environment variables:

export OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_METRICS_ENDPOINT="http://your-collector:4318/v1/metrics"
adk web path/to/your/agents_dir

Note: You can also set the general OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT environment variable if you would like to send traces and logs to the same endpoint in addition to metrics.

GCP export¶

To enable metrics export to Google Cloud Monitoring, use the -otel_to_cloud flag:

adk web -otel_to_cloud path/to/your/agents_dir

Programmatic metrics export¶

You can also configure metrics export programmatically in your application code.

OTLP export setup¶

To enable metrics and export them to an OpenTelemetry Collector (or an OTLP-compatible backend) programmatically:

from google.adk.telemetry.setup import maybe_set_otel_providers
import os

os.environ["OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_METRICS_ENDPOINT"] = "http://your-collector:4318/v1/metrics"
os.environ["OTEL_SERVICE_NAME"] = "your-adk-agent"
os.environ["OTEL_RESOURCE_ATTRIBUTES"] = "key1=value1,key2=value2"
maybe_set_otel_providers()

GCP export setup¶

To export metrics to Google Cloud Monitoring programmatically, use the OpenTelemetry Google Cloud exporter. Here is an example in Python:

from google.adk.telemetry.google_cloud import get_gcp_exporters
from google.adk.telemetry.setup import maybe_set_otel_providers
import os

gcp_exporters = get_gcp_exporters(
  enable_cloud_metrics = True,
)
os.environ["OTEL_SERVICE_NAME"] = "your-adk-agent"
os.environ["OTEL_RESOURCE_ATTRIBUTES"] = "key1=value1,key2=value2"
maybe_set_otel_providers([gcp_exporters])