Introducing: Cloudflare Agents (opens in new tab)
Cloudflare is introducing Agents, a unified platform for deploying, observing, and improving hosted AI agents. Its first major feature is agent tracing, which exposes model calls, tool execution, token usage, approvals, subagents, and underlying Cloudflare infrastructure in one view. The goal is to help developers diagnose agent failures, understand costs and latency, and use operational data to continuously improve agent behavior. ## Agent Tracing Adds Visibility - Traditional telemetry can show that an HTTP request succeeded while hiding agent-level failures, such as: - Choosing the wrong tool - Passing stale context to a subagent - Entering a token-consuming retry loop - Cloudflare’s agent-aware traces capture: - Agent invocations - Model calls and token usage - Tool executions and results - Approval or pause events - Supported subagent calls - These agent spans appear alongside existing Workers telemetry for fetches, KV, D1, Durable Objects, and other infrastructure. - Initial integrations support Think, Flue, and AI SDK through OpenTelemetry-compatible tooling. ## Reviewing Agents in the Cloudflare Dashboard - A new Agents view lists observed agents, traces, sessions, instances, runs, and token usage. - Developers can inspect agent behavior through: - **Session replay**, which reconstructs recorded conversations - **Trace waterfalls**, which show execution timing and nested operations ## Session Replay - The Messages tab displays: - System instructions - User messages - Model reasoning - Tool calls, arguments, and results - Final responses - Replay is based on captured data and does not re-execute the agent. - It can reveal malformed tool arguments, inappropriate tool choices, subagent handoffs, retries, and context that influenced later decisions. - Think, Flue, and AI SDK provide `storeMessages` and `storeTools` controls to determine whether message and tool payloads are recorded. - Payload capture can be disabled when data may contain personal information, secrets, or other sensitive content. ## Trace Waterfalls Connect Agent and Infrastructure Activity - Traces show how much time each part of a turn consumed and how operations relate to one another. - A parent agent can be connected to nested subagents, model calls, tools, and Cloudflare resources. - Example operations include: - A parent `TravelPlanner` invocation lasting 2.72 minutes - An `itinerary_builder` subagent using 1.83 minutes - Model calls with duration and provider-reported token usage - Tool executions - D1 queries and KV writes triggered by those tools - Nested tracing makes it possible to follow work from the original agent through delegated tasks and the infrastructure each task used. ## Enabling Agent Tracing - Enable tracing in `wrangler.jsonc`: ```json { "observability": { "traces": { "enabled": true } } } ``` - Setup then depends on the agent stack: - **Think and Flue:** Emit agent, conversation, turn, model, and tool telemetry through their tracing integrations. - **AI SDK:** Wrap the SDK with Cloudflare’s `wrapAISDK()` adapter. - **Custom harnesses:** Use Cloudflare’s custom spans API and OpenTelemetry’s Generative AI semantic conventions. ## Broader OpenTelemetry Support - Cloudflare plans to support the OpenTelemetry API directly inside Workers. - Frameworks that already emit standard Generative AI spans will eventually work in the Agents view without Cloudflare-specific adapters. - Standard agent and conversation identifiers will allow Cloudflare to group spans into agents and sessions. - This complements Cloudflare’s existing ability to export OpenTelemetry data by allowing Workers to accept standard telemetry directly. ## OpenTelemetry Export - Agent telemetry is not restricted to Cloudflare. - Traces can be exported to OTLP-compatible observability providers by configuring a destination in the Worker’s Wrangler configuration. Cloudflare’s initial Agents release focuses on making AI behavior inspectable rather than treating agents as opaque application requests. Developers should enable tracing, choose payload retention carefully for privacy, and use session replay and nested traces to identify correctness, latency, cost, and orchestration problems.