title: SmolAgents description: Instrument HuggingFace SmolAgents and send traces to OpenObserve via OpenTelemetry.

SmolAgents → OpenObserve

Automatically capture agent runs, tool executions, code generation steps, and LLM calls for every SmolAgents workflow in your Python application.

Prerequisites

• Python 3.10+
• An OpenObserve account (cloud or self-hosted)
• Your OpenObserve organisation ID and Base64-encoded auth token
• An OpenAI API key or a HuggingFace token for the model backend

Installation

pip install openobserve-telemetry-sdk openinference-instrumentation-smolagents "smolagents[litellm]" python-dotenv

Configuration

Create a .env file in your project root:

# OpenObserve instance URL
# Default for self-hosted: http://localhost:5080
OPENOBSERVE_URL=https://api.openobserve.ai/

# Your OpenObserve organisation slug or ID
OPENOBSERVE_ORG=your_org_id

# Basic auth token — Base64-encoded "email:password"
OPENOBSERVE_AUTH_TOKEN=Basic <your_base64_token>

# LLM provider key (whichever model backend the agent uses)
OPENAI_API_KEY=your-openai-key

Instrumentation

Call SmolagentsInstrumentor().instrument() before importing SmolAgents.

from dotenv import load_dotenv
load_dotenv()

from openinference.instrumentation.smolagents import SmolagentsInstrumentor
from openobserve import openobserve_init

SmolagentsInstrumentor().instrument()
openobserve_init()

import os
from smolagents import CodeAgent, LiteLLMModel

model = LiteLLMModel(
    model_id="openai/gpt-4o-mini",
    api_key=os.environ["OPENAI_API_KEY"],
)
agent = CodeAgent(tools=[], model=model)

result = agent.run("What is the square root of 144?")
print(result)

Tool use

from smolagents import CodeAgent, LiteLLMModel, tool

@tool
def get_current_time() -> str:
    """Returns the current UTC time."""
    from datetime import datetime, timezone
    return datetime.now(timezone.utc).isoformat()

agent = CodeAgent(tools=[get_current_time], model=model)
result = agent.run("What time is it right now in UTC?")
print(result)

What Gets Captured

Each agent.run() call produces a root AGENT span with child LLM spans for every model call, and TOOL spans when tools are invoked.

LLM span

Viewing Traces

1. Log in to OpenObserve and navigate to Traces in the left sidebar
2. Click any root agent span to open the waterfall view
3. Expand the tree to see child LiteLLMModel.generate LLM spans per reasoning step
4. Filter by llm_model_name to compare token usage across different model backends

[SmolAgents trace in OpenObserve]

Next Steps

With SmolAgents instrumented, every agent run is recorded in OpenObserve with a full span hierarchy. From here you can track token consumption per agent task, measure tool execution latency, and monitor multi-step reasoning chains.

Read More

• LLM Observability Overview
• Traces Ingestion with Python
• Exploring Traces in OpenObserve
• Building Dashboards