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The Claude Agent SDK is Anthropic’s framework for building AI agents that can reason, use tools, and complete multi-step tasks. It includes built-in support for OpenTelemetry tracing, making it easy to capture detailed telemetry from your agent workflows. This quickstart shows how to send traces from your Claude Agent SDK applications to Scorecard for observability, debugging, and evaluation.
Using the standard Anthropic SDK? Check out the general Tracing Quickstart for the proxy method that works with any Anthropic client.

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Steps

1

Set up environment variables

Configure the OpenTelemetry exporter to send traces to Scorecard. You’ll need your Scorecard API key from Settings.
export OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_HEADERS="Authorization=Bearer <your_scorecard_api_key>"
export ENABLE_BETA_TRACING_DETAILED=1
export BETA_TRACING_ENDPOINT="https://tracing.scorecard.io/otel"
Replace <your_scorecard_api_key> with your actual Scorecard API key (starts with ak_).
2

Run your agent

With the environment variables configured, run your Claude Agent SDK application. All agent activity is automatically traced.
example.py
import anyio
from claude_agent_sdk import (
    AssistantMessage,
    TextBlock,
    query,
)

async def main():
    async for message in query(prompt="What is 2 + 2?"):
        if isinstance(message, AssistantMessage):
            for block in message.content:
                if isinstance(block, TextBlock):
                    print(f"Claude: {block.text}")

anyio.run(main)
3

View traces in Scorecard

Navigate to the Records page in Scorecard to see your agent traces.
It may take 1-2 minutes for traces to appear on the Records page.
Records table showing Claude Agent SDK tracesRecords table showing Claude Agent SDK traces

Records page showing agent traces

Click on any record to view the full trace details, including the complete request/response data and model usage.
Trace details viewTrace details view

Trace details with request/response data and model usage

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What Gets Traced

The Claude Agent SDK automatically captures:
Trace DataDescription
LLM CallsEvery messages.create call with full prompt and completion
Tool UseTool invocations, inputs, and outputs as nested spans
Model UsageInput, output, and total token counts per call
Model InfoModel name, parameters, and configuration
ErrorsAny failures with full error context

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Environment Variables Reference

VariableRequiredDescription
OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_HEADERSYesAuthentication header: Authorization=Bearer <scorecard_api_key>
ENABLE_BETA_TRACING_DETAILEDYesSet to 1 to enable detailed tracing
BETA_TRACING_ENDPOINTYesOTLP endpoint URL (use https://tracing.scorecard.io/otel for Scorecard)

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Next Steps

Tracing Features

Learn about advanced tracing patterns and trace grouping

Monitoring

Set up production monitoring for your Claude agents

Metrics

Create custom metrics to evaluate agent performance

Trace to Testcase

Convert production traces into evaluation test cases