[FR]: Emit canonical gen_ai.* OTEL metrics from ADK's telemetry layer — RFC feedback request

[sauravGit]

Summary

I'm proposing a vendor-neutral, OpenTelemetry-compatible semantic convention for LLM observability metrics and would love to understand whether Google ADK's telemetry layer would support emitting data conformant with this convention.

The Problem

Every LLM agent framework and observability tool today uses its own metric names and attribute schemas. Teams building multi-provider or multi-framework LLM apps — including those built on ADK — have to adapt their instrumentation for every backend change. There's no shared language at the metric layer.

The Proposal

A canonical gen_ai.* metric schema built on top of the OpenTelemetry GenAI semantic conventions that standardizes:

Required core metrics (MUST be emitted):

Metric	Instrument	Unit	Description
gen_ai.client.operation.duration	Histogram	s	End-to-end latency
gen_ai.client.time_to_first_token	Histogram	s	Streaming TTFT
gen_ai.usage.input_tokens	Counter	{token}	Prompt tokens
gen_ai.usage.output_tokens	Counter	{token}	Completion tokens
gen_ai.usage.cost	Counter	usd	Estimated cost
gen_ai.client.error_rate	Gauge	1	Error ratio
gen_ai.client.retry_count	Counter	{request}	Retries
gen_ai.client.rate_limit.events	Counter	{event}	HTTP 429s

Required span attributes: gen_ai.system, gen_ai.request.model, gen_ai.operation.name

Agent-specific extension pack (gen_ai.agent.*):

Metric	Instrument	Description
gen_ai.agent.duration	Histogram	End-to-end agent execution time
gen_ai.agent.steps	Histogram	Number of reasoning/tool steps per run
gen_ai.agent.tool_calls	Counter	Tool invocations per agent run
gen_ai.agent.handoffs	Counter	Agent-to-agent handoff events

Why This Matters for ADK Specifically

ADK is one of the most capable multi-agent frameworks available, and it already has a telemetry layer built on OpenTelemetry. If ADK emitted gen_ai.* canonical metrics natively, any observability backend (Langfuse, Arize, Grafana, Datadog, GCP Cloud Monitoring) could consume ADK agent traces and metrics without a custom adapter — dramatically lowering the operational burden for teams building production agents with ADK.

This is also directly aligned with the OTel GenAI SIG's direction: an OTel maintainer (@trask) has already engaged on this proposal and pointed to https://github.com/open-telemetry/semantic-conventions-genai as the right upstream venue for standardization.

Specific Questions for the ADK Team

1. Does ADK's current telemetry layer already emit any gen_ai.*-namespaced attributes or metrics? If so, which ones?
2. Are the proposed metric names and instrument types (Histogram for latency/s, Counter with {token} for tokens) compatible with how ADK's OpenTelemetry integration currently works?
3. Would the ADK team be open to adopting these canonical names in ADK's OTEL export layer once the spec matures through the OTel GenAI SIG?
4. For multi-agent scenarios (agent handoffs, subagent calls), does the proposed gen_ai.agent.* extension pack cover the signals ADK currently captures?

Links

• Full RFC v0.2 (with migration guide, SDK examples, PromQL dashboards): https://github.com/sauravGit/open-llm-observability/blob/main/RFC.md
• GitHub discussion on the RFC: https://github.com/sauravGit/open-llm-observability/discussions
• Python SDK scaffold (OTEL-native): https://github.com/sauravGit/open-llm-observability/tree/main/sdk/python
• OTel GenAI SIG: https://github.com/open-telemetry/community/blob/main/projects/gen-ai.md

Happy to answer questions or adjust the RFC based on ADK's telemetry architecture. The goal is for ADK-instrumented agents to be observable on any OTEL-compatible backend without any custom adapter code.