Telemetry Status & Enablement Check Reference

Required Telemetry Environment Variables

To successfully export evaluation traces, the agent's deployment spec MUST have the following environment variables:

How to Enable Telemetry via Terraform

Update the google_vertex_ai_reasoning_engine resource's deployment_spec.env blocks:

resource "google_vertex_ai_reasoning_engine" "my_agent" {
  ...
  spec {
    deployment_spec {
      env {
        name  = "GOOGLE_CLOUD_AGENT_ENGINE_ENABLE_TELEMETRY"
        value = "true"
      }
      env {
        name  = "OTEL_INSTRUMENTATION_GENAI_CAPTURE_MESSAGE_CONTENT"
        value = "EVENT_ONLY"
      }
      env {
        name  = "OTEL_SEMCONV_STABILITY_OPT_IN"
        value = "gen_ai_latest_experimental"
      }
    }
  }
}

Telemetry and Data Generation Dependencies

Even if telemetry environment variables are configured on the agent, verify these additional dependencies. Note that quality metrics will NOT populate, and quality metrics alert policies and the Online Monitor should be skipped if the decision is to NOT enable the required APIs:

1. API Enablement: Ensure the following APIs are enabled in the GCP project:

   • Cloud Trace API: cloudtrace.googleapis.com (needed for exporting spans)
   • Observability API: observability.googleapis.com (needed for trace storage and SQL queries by the evaluator)

   To check if they are enabled:

   gcloud services list --enabled --project="[PROJECT_ID]" \
     --filter="name:(cloudtrace.googleapis.com observability.googleapis.com)"
   

2. IAM Permissions: The service account assigned to the agent (default or custom) MUST have the Cloud Trace Agent (roles/cloudtrace.agent) and Logs Writer (roles/logging.logWriter) roles.