Set up the SDK
For first-time setup, the Tracing quickstart gets you running in 5 minutes. This page is the deeper manual reference: framework-specific instrumentors, decorators for custom spans, and advanced configuration.
First export your Respan API key, then pick the instrumentation path that matches your stack.
Auto-instrumented SDKs
Most of these LLM SDKs are traced automatically — just install Respan and initialize, no instrumentor imports needed. A few (marked ➕) need an explicit instrumentor; see the footnotes below the table.
Legend: ✅ auto-instrumented (no imports) · ➕ supported, needs an explicit instrumentor (see footnotes) · — not supported.
1 Not bundled in respan-ai. Install the provider’s instrumentor and pass it, e.g. pip install respan-instrumentation-cohere then Respan(instrumentations=[CohereInstrumentor()]). Mistral and Groq require Python <3.13.
2 In TypeScript, @google/genai is not auto-instrumented — see the Google GenAI guide.
Agent frameworks (explicit instrumentor)
Agent frameworks require an explicit instrumentor because they capture higher-level spans (agent runs, handoffs, tool calls) beyond raw LLM calls.
OpenAI Agents
Claude Agents
Vercel AI
Pydantic AI
More
Already have OpenTelemetry set up? Send spans directly via Manual ingestion.
Disable auto-instrumentation
By default, Respan auto-instruments all supported providers. You can disable specific ones:
In Python, you can also enable only specific providers instead of disabling:
Add custom instrumentors
Agent frameworks and custom integrations require explicit instrumentors. Pass them via the instrumentations parameter:
When instrumentations are provided, auto-instrumentation is disabled by default to avoid duplicate spans. Pass is_auto_instrument=True (Python) to enable both.
Next steps
- Customize traces — Use decorators to create nested, hierarchical traces
- Enrich span attributes — Attach metadata, customer identifiers, and other properties
- Manual ingestion — Send spans via OTLP or JSON API