AMAZON BEDROCK / SERVICE DETAIL S08
AGENTCORE OBSERVABILITY
CHAPTER 19 / 36
IN ONE LINE a flight recorder for your agent
REV 2026.07
An agent makes its own decisions, so when something goes wrong you need to see exactly what it did, step by step. Observability records every step, which tools it called, what the model said, how long it took, how many tokens it used, and shows it in Amazon CloudWatch, like a flight recorder for your agent.
New to these words? Read chapter 02 "Key terms" (trace and span, session, token).
[ 1 ] WHAT IT IS
Observability lets you trace, debug, and monitor agents in production. AgentCore automatically records key numbers, model calls, token use, tool runs, latency, and errors, for Runtime, Memory, Gateway, Tools, and Identity, and stores them in Amazon CloudWatch. From there you can drill from a high-level problem down to the exact step that caused it.
THE PROBLEM IT SOLVES
Agents are unpredictable. Without a record, you cannot tell why one answered wrong or slowly.
WHERE IT LIVES
The GenAI Observability dashboard in Amazon CloudWatch. Built on OpenTelemetry (OTEL), the open standard.
[ 2 ] HOW THE RECORD IS ORGANIZED, ZOOM IN TO FIND A PROBLEM
LEVEL 1
SESSION
The whole conversation with a user (named by a session id).
ZOOM IN ==>
LEVEL 2
TRACE
One request inside it: a single question and its answer.
ZOOM IN ==>
LEVEL 3
SPAN
One step inside a trace: a single model call, or a single tool call.
You start at the problem, say a slow session, open its trace, and find the span that took too long.
[ 3 ] WHAT THE DASHBOARD SHOWS
AGENTS VIEW
All your agents, on or off AgentCore, with their metrics.
SESSIONS VIEW
Every conversation, to follow a user's journey.
TRACES VIEW
The step-by-step trajectory and timeline of one request.
DEFAULT METRICS
Tokens, latency, errors, tool calls, session count, captured for you.
[ 4 ] TWO WAYS TO TURN IT ON
RUNTIME-HOSTED automatic
Deploy with the AgentCore CLI and your agent is instrumented for you.
No extra libraries or code.
SELF-HOSTED add ADOT
For an agent running elsewhere, add the ADOT library and run with one command.
The same data flows to CloudWatch.
One-time setup per account: turn on CloudWatch Transaction Search so spans and traces appear (they land in the shared aws/spans log group, or in the agent's own log group in Regions with the unified span destination). It is OpenTelemetry, so you can also send the data to your own OTEL-compatible tools instead.