Starting today, the Claude Platform exports OpenTelemetry (OTel) traces natively from Claude Managed Agents, the Messages API and the Claude SDKs, in public beta. New Relic AI Monitoring reads those spans where they land. Its Normalize on Read architecture queries them straight from the Span table, so nothing gets duplicated at ingest, and, when your application passes its trace context (the Claude SDK does this for you), each Claude span sits in the same trace as your APM data.
The same spans can feed New Relic AI Evaluation, in public preview. With Full content turned on, it screens live Claude prompts and completions for prompt injection, PII leakage and toxicity.
Until now, an agent run was split between consoles. Your services ran the custom tools, and the Claude Platform ran the model and, with Claude Managed Agents, the agent loop.
One Trace From Your Service to the Model
Add New Relic as a destination in the Claude Console. Then set up tracing in the Claude SDK, as Anthropic's OpenTelemetry guide shows, and point your application's OpenTelemetry exporter at New Relic. When your code calls the SDK inside its own spans, the SDK passes your trace context to the Claude Platform, so the platform's spans nest under yours.
- Claude Managed Agents: Every session request, agent turn, model request, tool use and outcome evaluation.
- Messages API: Each message request with its model requests and compactions, plus any server or MCP connector tool use.
- Claude SDKs: Your application's requests and custom tools, for Python, TypeScript, Go, Java, C#, PHP and Ruby.
Spans follow the OTel GenAI semantic conventions, which AI Observability already reads, so there's no attribute mapping to maintain.
Debug Agents in the Context of Your Whole Stack
Say a support agent takes 40 seconds to issue a refund. The model is rarely the whole story. AI Observability shows the model replying quickly, then your service spending 36 seconds running the lookup_order tool. That tool called your orders API, which was waiting on a database query that slowed down after last night's deploy. Because Claude's spans share a trace with your APM data, you can follow the trail past the agent, which LLM-only tools can't do.
From Symptom to Root Cause in One View
- Agent Trace Waterfall: Model requests and tool uses on one timeline inside your own service spans.
- Agents as Entities: Each Claude Managed Agents agent gets its own entity, with latency and error rate you watch like any service.
- Conversation Replay: Step through a session message by message, with prompts and responses beside timing when Full content is on.
- Alerts and Dashboards: It's New Relic data, so NRQL alerts and your existing dashboards work on it.
Govern Tool Use
With Full content, each tool span carries the tool's arguments and result, which gives teams a record of what each agent touched. Choose Full content to capture prompts and responses, or Metadata only to keep timing and identifiers, names. Route Claude traffic into New Relic AI Evaluation and that record gets screened as it happens.
Start Observing Your Claude Agents Today
An organization admin adds New Relic as a destination on the OpenTelemetry settings page of the Claude Console, picks their New Relic region (US, EU or JP), enters an ingest license key, and chooses which workspaces send traces. Spans arrive within about a minute, with no code changes on the API side.
Claude Platform tracing is in public beta for the first-party Claude Platform. Amazon Bedrock and Google Cloud Vertex AI support will be coming soon.
Read the setup guide to connect your Claude agents, or request a demo to see Claude traces in AI Observability. Anthropic's announcement [Claude blog link] covers their side of the launch. New to New Relic? Sign up for a free account.
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