Overview

Real-time traces are one of Laminar’s most powerful features, allowing you to see spans as they’re being executed without waiting for the top-level span to complete. This provides immediate visibility into trace data during development and debugging processes, which is especially valuable when:

  • Working with long-running operations
  • Debugging complex agent interactions
  • Monitoring multiple chained LLM requests
  • Testing a system in development

How It Works

Laminar uses OpenTelemetry for trace collection and processing. By default, it uses BatchSpanProcessor, which buffers and sends traces in batches to optimize performance:

  • Traces are collected and stored temporarily on the client side
  • Data is sent periodically to the Laminar backend
  • There’s a small delay between span completion and dashboard visibility
  • The delay depends on batch configuration (flush interval and batch size)

Real-time traces are currently available only in the Laminar cloud platform.

Disable Batching (Optional)

For immediate trace visibility, you can disable batching by setting disableBatch to true in the Laminar.initialize function:

Laminar.initialize({
    // ... other options
    disableBatch: true,
});

This configuration uses SimpleSpanProcessor, which processes and sends traces immediately.

Performance Considerations

  • Development: Real-time processing provides immediate feedback, beneficial for debugging and development workflows
  • Production: Batch processing is recommended for better performance and resource utilization

While real-time traces provide immediate visibility, disabling batching may impact application performance in production environments.

Benefits

  1. Immediate Feedback: See traces as they happen, without waiting for operations to complete
  2. Faster Debugging: Identify issues in real-time without waiting for batched processing
  3. Progress Monitoring: Track long-running operations as they execute
  4. Enhanced Development Experience: Test and iterate more quickly with instant visibility