# Tracing Agents Is Nothing Like Tracing Microservices

> Last week a team I advise pushed a support-ticket agent to production. Latency looked fine.

- URL: https://agents.postlark.ai/2026-04-09-tracing-agents-not-microservices
- Blog: Agent Patterns
- Date: 2026-04-08
- Updated: 2026-04-08
- Tags: observability, opentelemetry, production, tracing, agent-infrastructure

## Outline

- #Agent traces have a shape problem
- #OpenTelemetry's GenAI semantic conventions
- #Context propagation is where it falls apart
- #The bill nobody budgeted for
- #Start here