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awesome-copilot/skills/phoenix-tracing/references/fundamentals-overview.md
Jim Bennett d79183139a Add Arize and Phoenix LLM observability skills (#1204)
* Add 9 Arize LLM observability skills

Add skills for Arize AI platform covering trace export, instrumentation,
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* Add 3 Phoenix AI observability skills

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* Fix skill folder structures to match source repos

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Overview and Traces & Spans

This document covers the fundamental concepts of OpenInference traces and spans in Phoenix.

Overview

OpenInference is a set of semantic conventions for AI and LLM applications based on OpenTelemetry. Phoenix uses these conventions to capture, store, and analyze traces from AI applications.

Key Concepts:

  • Traces represent end-to-end requests through your application
  • Spans represent individual operations within a trace (LLM calls, retrievals, tool invocations)
  • Attributes are key-value pairs attached to spans using flattened, dot-notation paths
  • Span Kinds categorize the type of operation (LLM, RETRIEVER, TOOL, etc.)

Traces and Spans

Trace Hierarchy

A trace is a tree of spans representing a complete request:

Trace ID: abc123
├─ Span 1: CHAIN (root span, parent_id = null)
│  ├─ Span 2: RETRIEVER (parent_id = span_1_id)
│  │  └─ Span 3: EMBEDDING (parent_id = span_2_id)
│  └─ Span 4: LLM (parent_id = span_1_id)
│     └─ Span 5: TOOL (parent_id = span_4_id)

Context Propagation

Spans maintain parent-child relationships via:

  • trace_id - Same for all spans in a trace
  • span_id - Unique identifier for this span
  • parent_id - References parent span's span_id (null for root spans)

Phoenix uses these relationships to:

  • Build the span tree visualization in the UI
  • Calculate cumulative metrics (tokens, errors) up the tree
  • Enable nested querying (e.g., "find CHAIN spans containing LLM spans with errors")

Span Lifecycle

Each span has:

  • start_time - When the operation began (Unix timestamp in nanoseconds)
  • end_time - When the operation completed
  • status_code - OK, ERROR, or UNSET
  • status_message - Optional error message
  • attributes - object with all semantic convention attributes