Tracing
Understand how Prisma captures and organizes LLM traces
Tracing is the foundation of Prisma's observability. Every LLM call, chain execution, and agent action is captured as a trace.
What is a Trace?
A trace represents a single end-to-end request through your LLM application. It contains:
- Spans — Individual operations within the trace (LLM calls, retrievals, tool uses)
- Metadata — Custom key-value pairs attached to spans
- Metrics — Cost, latency, and token usage for each span
Trace Hierarchy
Traces are organized hierarchically: a parent trace contains child spans, which can themselves contain child spans. This mirrors the execution flow of your application.