How to integrate Claude Code's telemetry with Phoenix?

[vitorbaptista]

Hi,

I saw the blog at https://arize.com/blog/claude-code-observability-and-tracing-introducing-dev-agent-lens/ which creates a LiteLLM proxy to allow exporting Claude Code's traces to Phoenix Arize. However, I also saw that Claude Code exports OTEL natively (see https://code.claude.com/docs/en/monitoring-usage). If that works, it's much simpler. I am trying to set it up.

I've configured my local .claude/settings.local.json as:

  "env": {
    "CLAUDE_CODE_ENABLE_TELEMETRY": "1",
    "OTEL_METRICS_EXPORTER": "otlp",
    "OTEL_LOGS_EXPORTER": "otlp",
    "OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_PROTOCOL": "grpc",
    "OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT": "https://app.phoenix.arize.com/s/MY_TEAM",
    "OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_HEADERS": "Authorization=Bearer MY_TOKEN"
  }

That isn't working. I also tried changing to:

"OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_PROTOCOL": "http/protobuf",
"OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT": "https://app.phoenix.arize.com/s/MY_TEAM/v1/traces",

Still, nothing appears. Am I misconfiguring something or what I'm trying to do isn't supported yet?

Thanks!

[dosubot[bot]]

You can integrate Claude Code's native OTEL telemetry directly with Phoenix—no proxy needed—but the endpoint and protocol must match Phoenix's OTLP collector, not your Phoenix project URL. Phoenix expects traces via OTLP either over gRPC (default port 4317) or HTTP/protobuf (endpoint path /v1/traces) docs.

Key points:

• For HTTP/protobuf, set:
  • OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_PROTOCOL: "http/protobuf"
  • OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT: "https://app.phoenix.arize.com/v1/traces"
• For gRPC, set:
  • OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_PROTOCOL: "grpc"
  • OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT: "https://app.phoenix.arize.com:4317"
• The endpoint must be the collector root, not /s/MY_TEAM or /s/MY_TEAM/v1/traces discussion.
• Set your API key in the headers: OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_HEADERS: "Authorization=Bearer YOUR_API_KEY" docs.
• To group traces by project, set the project name in OTEL resource attributes (if Claude Code supports this) or via Phoenix's environment variable before instrumentation docs.

Common misconfigurations: Using the Phoenix project URL as the OTEL endpoint, missing /v1/traces for HTTP, or not setting the correct protocol. If you see HTTP 415 errors, check that the content type is application/x-protobuf endpoint code.

Example config for HTTP/protobuf:

"env": {
  "CLAUDE_CODE_ENABLE_TELEMETRY": "1",
  "OTEL_METRICS_EXPORTER": "otlp",
  "OTEL_LOGS_EXPORTER": "otlp",
  "OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_PROTOCOL": "http/protobuf",
  "OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT": "https://app.phoenix.arize.com/v1/traces",
  "OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_HEADERS": "Authorization=Bearer YOUR_API_KEY"
}

If telemetry still doesn't appear, check Claude Code logs for export errors, verify your API key, and confirm endpoint reachability. Let me know if you need help with project naming or debugging specific errors!

To reply, just mention @dosu.

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[vitorbaptista]

Found the issue: Claude Code doesn't send traces, just metrics. There is an issue at anthropics/claude-code#2090 asking to implement this, but it was closed as not planned.

So the proxy seems to be the only way, unfortunately.