Monitor on-premises and multi-cloud AI agents with AgentCore Observability

When you deploy AI agents built with frameworks like Strands Agents, LangGraph, and CrewAI, you need observability into their performance. This holds true whether they run on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), AWS Lambda, on-premises, or another cloud provider such as Google Cloud Platform (GCP) or Microsoft Azure.

Amazon Bedrock AgentCore is a platform to build, connect, and optimize agents at scale, with any framework or model. Although Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Observability, a capability of Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, provides native tracing, monitoring, and analytics that local cloud monitoring tools don’t offer out of the box, it natively supports only agents deployed on AgentCore runtime in the AWS Cloud. If your agents run anywhere else, you need additional configuration to send telemetry to the dashboard.

In this post, we show you how to set up observability for agents running outside AWS. You learn how to configure the AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry (ADOT) auto-instrumentation in non-AWS environments, route telemetry to the AgentCore Observability dashboard, and validate the setup end to end.

The following diagram shows the end-to-end observability pipeline and how telemetry flows from agents to the AgentCore Observability dashboard.

The solution uses the AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry (ADOT) running in-process with the agent application. ADOT auto-instruments the agent framework and captures generative AI semantic convention spans, then exports the telemetry directly to the Amazon CloudWatch OpenTelemetry Protocol (OTLP) endpoint using SigV4 authentication with AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) credentials.

ADOT auto-instrumentation: The AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry handles the complexities of exporting telemetry from non-AWS environments.

IAM credentials: The ADOT uses these access keys to authenticate with CloudWatch and forward your agent’s telemetry (traces, metrics, and logs) to the AgentCore Observability dashboard.

Environment variables: These contain specific OpenTelemetry settings related to routing and authentication.

As seen in the following diagram, this cross-platform observability solution integrates several AWS services. Amazon CloudWatch serves as the foundation, handling telemetry ingestion and storage. Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Observability adds specialized monitoring dashboards for AI agents. AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry (ADOT) provides the cross-platform instrumentation capabilities. IAM secures the authentication between your external environments and AWS.

Observability is a foundational pillar of responsible AI. By routing telemetry to AgentCore Observability, you gain visibility into agent reasoning chains, tool invocations, and model outputs. This allows you to detect hallucinations, monitor for harmful or off-topic responses, track token usage for cost governance, and audit agent behavior across environments. This is especially critical for agents running outside AWS, where problematic outputs might go unnoticed without centralized observability.

An AWS account: with Amazon Bedrock model access configured (this walkthrough uses Claude Haiku). For model availability by AWS Region, refer to supported models by AWS Region in Amazon Bedrock. for designated AgentCore Observability and designated log group(s).

with Amazon Bedrock model access configured (this walkthrough uses Claude Haiku). For model availability by AWS Region, refer to supported models by AWS Region in Amazon Bedrock.

for designated AgentCore Observability and designated log group(s).

Python 3.10 or later installed on your non-AWS environment.

bedrock:InvokeModel.

cloudwatch:PutMetricData.

Outbound HTTPS access to AWS endpoints from your environment.

Auto-instrumentation: The opentelemetry-instrument command injects the ADOT into the Python runtime. It automatically patches boto3 (for Amazon Bedrock calls) and the Strands framework (for agent reasoning spans) to emit OpenTelemetry traces.

SigV4 authentication: The aws_configurator uses the boto3 credential chain to sign OTLP export requests with SigV4. From non-AWS environments, this uses the AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID and AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY environment variables.

CloudWatch OTLP endpoint: The ADOT exports traces and logs to the CloudWatch native OTLP ingestion endpoint. The OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_LOGS_HEADERS header directs logs to the specific AgentCore log group, which is how CloudWatch indexes the data under the generative AI observability dashboard. For details on how the CloudWatch OTLP endpoint URL is determined and configured, see CloudWatch OTLP endpoint.

Generative AI semantic conventions: The Strands [otel] package emits spans following the OpenTelemetry generative AI semantic conventions, including agent reasoning steps, tool invocations, and model calls with token usage.

The following diagram shows how telemetry export through ADOT auto-instrumentation works from non-AWS environments to CloudWatch.

Follow these steps to configure and run a Strands agent in a non-AWS environment, with telemetry routed to AgentCore Observability.

The aws-opentelemetry-distro package includes the ADOT auto-instrumentation with OTLP exporters specific to AWS and the aws_configurator that handles SigV4 authentication. The strands-agents[otel] package provides OpenTelemetry trace emission from the Strands framework.

Set your IAM user credentials as environment variables.

Security note: For production deployments, consider using IAM Roles Anywhere instead of long-lived access keys. With IAM Roles Anywhere, on-premises workloads can obtain temporary credentials using X.509 certificates.

AGENT_OBSERVABILITY_ENABLED=true activates generative AI-specific telemetry processing in the ADOT.

OTEL_PYTHON_DISTRO=aws_distro and OTEL_PYTHON_CONFIGURATOR=aws_configurator activate the OpenTelemetry configuration specific to AWS, including SigV4 signing for the CloudWatch OTLP endpoint.

OTEL_RESOURCE_ATTRIBUTES with aws.log.group.names tells CloudWatch to index the telemetry under the AgentCore Observability dashboard. Without this, traces go to generic Amazon CloudWatch Logs.

OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_LOGS_HEADERS with x-aws-metric-namespace=bedrock-agentcore routes metrics in embedded metric format to the correct CloudWatch namespace.

Create a file named agent_test.py with a Strands agent:

The agent’s response appears in the terminal. Behind the scenes, the ADOT captures traces, spans, and logs, and exports them to CloudWatch.

You see telemetry data within two to three minutes of execution. Open the Amazon CloudWatch console:

Choose GenAI Observability, then Bedrock AgentCore.

In the Agents tab, look for my-external-agent.

Choose the agent to view sessions, traces, and span metrics.

The following screenshot shows the telemetry from the Strands agent (my-external-agent) running in a non-AWS environment, as seen in the AgentCore Observability dashboard in CloudWatch.

Agent name: my-external-agent.

Sessions: at least one session.

Traces: trace spans showing the agent’s reasoning and Amazon Bedrock model invocations.

Span details: invoke_agent, chat, execute_event_loop_cycle, and chat.us.anthropic.claude-haiku spans with latency and token metrics.

The following screenshot shows a successful trace from the Strands agent (my-external-agent) with four spans, model information, and latency and token details in the AgentCore Observability dashboard.

To confirm the solution works from a third-party cloud provider, we tested the same setup from Google Cloud Shell, a browser-based terminal running on GCP infrastructure.

The following screenshot shows the Strands agent (gcp-hosted-agent) running on Google Cloud Shell (GCP) and returning a successful response.

Within two to three minutes of execution, the gcp-hosted-agent appears in the AgentCore Observability dashboard alongside agents running on AgentCore runtime or other environments.

The following screenshot shows a successful trace from the Strands agent (gcp-hosted-agent) running on GCP with four spans, model information, and latency and token details in the AgentCore Observability dashboard.

The telemetry is identical to what an AgentCore runtime-hosted agent produces. Sessions, traces, span metrics, token usage, and latency are all visible in the same dashboard, regardless of where the agent runs.

Although this walkthrough uses Strands Agents, the same ADOT-based pattern applies to other OpenTelemetry-compatible agent frameworks.

When choosing how to deploy your AI agents, understanding the observability trade-offs between different runtime environments helps you make the right architectural decision. Agents deployed directly on Amazon Bedrock AgentCore runtime benefit from automatic observability configuration. Agents running in non-AWS environments require additional manual setup but offer greater deployment flexibility. The following comparison highlights the key differences in telemetry collection, credential management, and use cases to help you determine the best approach for your requirements.

Use consistent naming: The service.name in OTEL_RESOURCE_ATTRIBUTES becomes the agent name on the dashboard. Use descriptive names that identify the environment (for example, prod-onprem-support-agent and staging-gcp-research-agent).

Verify with get-caller-identity first: Before running the agent, confirm that your credentials work by running python -c "import boto3; print(boto3.client('sts').get_caller_identity())". If this fails, the ADOT also fails silently.

Use Python 3.10 or later: The ADOT requires Python 3.10 or later. We recommend Python 3.12 for the best compatibility with all dependencies.

Rotate credentials regularly: For production deployments, avoid long-lived access keys. Consider IAM Roles Anywhere for on-premises workloads, or use your cloud provider’s identity federation to assume AWS IAM roles.

This walkthrough uses Amazon Bedrock, Amazon CloudWatch, and AWS X-Ray, which incur costs. See the respective pricing pages for details.

Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Observability isn’t limited to agents running on AgentCore runtime or within AWS. Using ADOT auto-instrumentation with IAM credentials and the correct OpenTelemetry environment variables, you can send telemetry from your choice of environment with internet access. Your agents can run on-premises, on GCP, on Azure, or anywhere else and still report to the same AgentCore Observability dashboard.

The setup requires a pip install and a set of environment variables. The resulting telemetry is identical to what AgentCore runtime-hosted agents produce: sessions, traces, span metrics, and token usage, all in one unified view.

To get started, clone the sample code from GitHub and follow the instructions in the README to configure and run the agent in your environment.

For agents already running on AWS but outside AgentCore runtime (EKS, ECS, Lambda), refer to the AgentCore Observability for EKS-hosted agents tutorial. For agents on AgentCore runtime, observability is configured automatically. See Add observability to your AgentCore resources.