Introduction

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What is Laminar Tracing?

Laminar offers comprehensive observability for your LLM applications, capturing the entire execution flow with minimal setup. This allows you to:

• Debug complex Agents and LLM workflows by seeing exactly how data flows through your application
• Monitor performance with detailed execution time and token usage metrics
• Track costs across different models and components
• Analyze user sessions to understand and improve the end-user experience

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Key Concepts

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Span

A single operation in your application’s execution flow, such as a function call or an API request. Spans include:

• Attributes: Input parameters, return values, and other metadata
• Path: Hierarchical location in your code (e.g., get_user.validate.api_call)
• Duration: How long the operation took to execute

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Trace

A collection of spans that form a complete execution path. Traces show parent-child relationships between operations, helping you understand how your code executes.

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Session

A group of related traces belonging to the same user interaction or conversation, allowing you to analyze complete user journeys.

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Visualization Example

The tree view on the left shows a trace of an LLM application. The hierarchy displays how functions call each other:

• answer_question calls fetch_page_and_check
• which calls check_presence
• which calls OpenAI

Each node in this tree is a span, giving you a complete picture of your application’s execution.

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What Laminar Captures

For every execution of your application, Laminar automatically records:

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Performance Metrics

• Total execution time
• Per-span execution times
• Bottlenecks and slow operations

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LLM-Specific Data

• Token counts (input and output)
• Model information
• Cost calculations

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Inputs & Outputs

• Function parameters
• Return values
• Prompts and completions

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Execution Flow

• Parent-child relationships
• Complete call hierarchy
• Cross-service transactions

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Next Steps

Now that you understand the basics of Laminar tracing:

• Get started quickly with our Quickstart Guide
• Explore our integrations to see how Laminar works with your favorite tools:
  • OpenAI
  • Anthropic
  • Gemini
  • Langchain
  • Next.js
  • Vercel AI SDK
  • LiteLLM
  • Playwright
  • Puppeteer
  • Browser Use
  • Stagehand
• Continue to Trace Structure to learn more about how to add structure to your traces
• Explore Browser agent observability to learn how to record browser sessions and sync them with agent execution steps