gen-ai-spans.md

Semantic Conventions for GenAI spans

Status: Experimental

• Name
  • Status
• GenAI attributes
• Capturing inputs and outputs

A request to an Generative AI is modeled as a span in a trace.

Span kind: SHOULD be CLIENT. It MAY be set to INTERNAL on spans representing call to models running in the same process. It's RECOMMENDED to use CLIENT kind when GenAI system being instrumented usually runs in a different process than its client or when GenAI call happens over instrumented protocol such as HTTP.

Name

GenAI spans MUST follow the overall guidelines for span names. The span name SHOULD be {gen_ai.operation.name} {gen_ai.request.model}. Semantic conventions for individual GenAI systems and frameworks MAY specify different span name format.

Status

Refer to the Recording Errors document for details on how to record span status.

GenAI attributes

These attributes track input data and metadata for a request to a GenAI model. Each attribute represents a concept that is common to most Generative AI clients. Many of these attributes only apply to specific GenAI operations. For example, GenAI embeddings requests don't use output tokens, so gen_ai.usage.output_tokens does not apply to embeddings operations.

Attribute	Type	Description	Examples	Requirement Level	Stability
gen_ai.operation.name	string	The name of the operation being performed. [1]	chat; text_completion; embeddings	Required
gen_ai.system	string	The Generative AI product as identified by the client or server instrumentation. [2]	openai	Required
error.type	string	Describes a class of error the operation ended with. [3]	timeout; java.net.UnknownHostException; server_certificate_invalid; 500	Conditionally Required if the operation ended in an error
gen_ai.request.model	string	The name of the GenAI model a request is being made to. [4]	gpt-4	Conditionally Required If available.
gen_ai.request.seed	int	Requests with same seed value more likely to return same result.	100	Conditionally Required if appliable and if the request includes a seed
server.port	int	GenAI server port. [5]	80; 8080; 443	Conditionally Required If server.address is set.
gen_ai.request.encoding_formats	string[]	The encoding formats requested in an embeddings operation, if specified. [6]	["base64"]; ["float", "binary"]	Recommended
gen_ai.request.frequency_penalty	double	The frequency penalty setting for the GenAI request.	0.1	Recommended
gen_ai.request.max_tokens	int	The maximum number of tokens the model generates for a request.	100	Recommended
gen_ai.request.presence_penalty	double	The presence penalty setting for the GenAI request.	0.1	Recommended
gen_ai.request.stop_sequences	string[]	List of sequences that the model will use to stop generating further tokens.	["forest", "lived"]	Recommended
gen_ai.request.temperature	double	The temperature setting for the GenAI request.	0.0	Recommended
gen_ai.request.top_k	double	The top_k sampling setting for the GenAI request.	1.0	Recommended
gen_ai.request.top_p	double	The top_p sampling setting for the GenAI request.	1.0	Recommended
gen_ai.response.finish_reasons	string[]	Array of reasons the model stopped generating tokens, corresponding to each generation received.	["stop"]; ["stop", "length"]	Recommended
gen_ai.response.id	string	The unique identifier for the completion.	chatcmpl-123	Recommended
gen_ai.response.model	string	The name of the model that generated the response. [7]	gpt-4-0613	Recommended
gen_ai.usage.input_tokens	int	The number of tokens used in the GenAI input (prompt).	100	Recommended
gen_ai.usage.output_tokens	int	The number of tokens used in the GenAI response (completion).	180	Recommended
server.address	string	GenAI server address. [8]	example.com; 10.1.2.80; /tmp/my.sock	Recommended

[1] gen_ai.operation.name: If one of the predefined values applies, but specific system uses a different name it's RECOMMENDED to document it in the semantic conventions for specific GenAI system and use system-specific name in the instrumentation. If a different name is not documented, instrumentation libraries SHOULD use applicable predefined value.

[2] gen_ai.system: The gen_ai.system describes a family of GenAI models with specific model identified by gen_ai.request.model and gen_ai.response.model attributes.

The actual GenAI product may differ from the one identified by the client. Multiple systems, including Azure OpenAI and Gemini, are accessible by OpenAI client libraries. In such cases, the gen_ai.system is set to openai based on the instrumentation's best knowledge, instead of the actual system. The server.address attribute may help identify the actual system in use for openai.

For custom model, a custom friendly name SHOULD be used. If none of these options apply, the gen_ai.system SHOULD be set to _OTHER.

[3] error.type: The error.type SHOULD match the error code returned by the Generative AI provider or the client library, the canonical name of exception that occurred, or another low-cardinality error identifier. Instrumentations SHOULD document the list of errors they report.

[4] gen_ai.request.model: The name of the GenAI model a request is being made to. If the model is supplied by a vendor, then the value must be the exact name of the model requested. If the model is a fine-tuned custom model, the value should have a more specific name than the base model that's been fine-tuned.

[5] server.port: When observed from the client side, and when communicating through an intermediary, server.port SHOULD represent the server port behind any intermediaries, for example proxies, if it's available.

[6] gen_ai.request.encoding_formats: In some GenAI systems the encoding formats are called embedding types. Also, some GenAI systems only accept a single format per request.

[7] gen_ai.response.model: If available. The name of the GenAI model that provided the response. If the model is supplied by a vendor, then the value must be the exact name of the model actually used. If the model is a fine-tuned custom model, the value should have a more specific name than the base model that's been fine-tuned.

[8] server.address: When observed from the client side, and when communicating through an intermediary, server.address SHOULD represent the server address behind any intermediaries, for example proxies, if it's available.

---

error.type has the following list of well-known values. If one of them applies, then the respective value MUST be used; otherwise, a custom value MAY be used.

Value	Description	Stability
_OTHER	A fallback error value to be used when the instrumentation doesn't define a custom value.

---

gen_ai.operation.name has the following list of well-known values. If one of them applies, then the respective value MUST be used; otherwise, a custom value MAY be used.

Value	Description	Stability
chat	Chat completion operation such as OpenAI Chat API
embeddings	Embeddings operation such as OpenAI Create embeddings API
text_completion	Text completions operation such as OpenAI Completions API (Legacy)

---

gen_ai.system has the following list of well-known values. If one of them applies, then the respective value MUST be used; otherwise, a custom value MAY be used.

Value	Description	Stability
anthropic	Anthropic
aws.bedrock	AWS Bedrock
az.ai.inference	Azure AI Inference
az.ai.openai	Azure OpenAI
cohere	Cohere
deepseek	DeepSeek
gemini	Gemini
groq	Groq
ibm.watsonx.ai	IBM Watsonx AI
mistral_ai	Mistral AI
openai	OpenAI
perplexity	Perplexity
vertex_ai	Vertex AI
xai	xAI

Capturing inputs and outputs

User inputs and model responses may be recorded as events parented to GenAI operation span. See Semantic Conventions for GenAI events for the details.