a2a-otel-kit

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Vendor-neutral distributed tracing for A2A agents and MCP services.

Connect agent-to-agent and MCP calls into a single OpenTelemetry trace using W3C Trace Context - without capturing prompts, messages, credentials, or business payloads.

Why this exists

Agentic systems rarely execute inside one process.

A single request can cross an orchestrator, one or more A2A agents, MCP servers, HTTP boundaries, and downstream services. Without explicit trace-context propagation, each hop becomes an isolated telemetry island and debugging turns into correlation by timestamps and guesswork.

a2a-otel-kit provides a small observability boundary for those distributed interactions:

• OpenTelemetry tracing exported through OTLP/HTTP.
• W3C traceparent and tracestate propagation.
• A2A client and server instrumentation.
• MCP Streamable HTTP client and server instrumentation.
• Structured JSON events correlated with active traces.
• Privacy-safe, deny-by-default telemetry attributes.
• Explicit lifecycle with flush and shutdown.
• No Datadog, Langfuse, or other vendor SDK dependency.

One business request. Multiple agents. Multiple protocols. One distributed trace.

What you get

Privacy by design

Built-in A2A/MCP adapter telemetry is metadata-only by construction, not merely "content capture disabled by default."

The sanitizer keeps only allowlisted keys, rejects credential-like keys even if explicitly added to an allowlist, and drops unsupported or oversized values. See Privacy model.

Caller-created application spans record exceptions by default, following OpenTelemetry behavior; pass record_exception=False when an exception may contain sensitive content. See the security policy for the exact boundary.

60-second quickstart

Install the base package:

uv add a2a-otel-kit

Or install protocol adapters:

uv add "a2a-otel-kit[a2a,mcp]"

Configure observability:

from a2a_otel_kit import Observability, ObservabilitySettings

settings = ObservabilitySettings(
    service_name="orchestrator",
    service_version="1.0.0",
    environment="local",
    enabled=True,
    otlp_endpoint="http://localhost:4318/v1/traces",
)

observability = Observability.configure(settings)

Create application spans and structured events:

with observability.start_span(
    "customer.lookup",
    attributes={"operation": "customer_lookup"},
):
    observability.emit_event(
        "customer.lookup.completed",
        "success",
        operation="customer_lookup",
    )

Always release exporter resources during shutdown:

try:
    ...
finally:
    observability.flush()
    observability.shutdown()

When enabled=False, tracing is a no-op and callers do not need branching logic.

End-to-end trace

A real interaction from the executable demo follows this topology:

orchestrator
└── demo.risk_assessment
    └── a2a.client.get_task
        └── risk-agent / a2a.server.on_get_task
            ├── mcp.client.streamable_http
            │   └── customer-data-mcp / mcp.server.streamable_http
            ├── mcp.client.streamable_http
            │   └── customer-data-mcp / mcp.server.streamable_http
            └── ...

The operation span is created before W3C context is injected, allowing downstream A2A and MCP work to continue the same distributed trace.

Live end-to-end proof

The repository includes an executable local demo with an Orchestrator, an A2A Risk Agent, a Customer Data MCP service, OpenTelemetry Collector, Tempo, and Grafana.

The 20-second walkthrough shows the demo running, verification passing, and the distributed trace in Grafana:

The final trace is also available as a static capture:

In this execution:

• 3 services participate in the same distributed trace: orchestrator, risk-agent, and customer-data-mcp;
• the trace contains 11 spans;
• A2A client/server context is preserved across the agent boundary;
• MCP Streamable HTTP client/server context continues the same trace;
• multiple MCP spans are expected because a real MCP session performs protocol operations in addition to the business tool call;
• the verifier requires the A2A and MCP spans to resolve to the same trace_id;
• a private business identifier is intentionally present in the business response and verified to be absent from the exported trace telemetry.

Run the proof locally:

docker compose -f examples/end_to_end/compose.yml up -d
uv run python examples/end_to_end/run_demo.py
uv run python examples/end_to_end/verify_trace.py

A successful verification ends with:

✓ A2A client span found
✓ A2A server span found
✓ MCP client span found
✓ MCP server span found
✓ Required spans share one trace_id
✓ Private business identifier absent from current trace telemetry

Demo verification: PASSED

The demo is intentionally focused: it proves distributed trace continuity across A2A and MCP boundaries and the metadata-only telemetry model. It does not add an LLM, database, agent framework, or cloud dependency merely to make the example more complex.

A2A integration

Install:

uv add "a2a-otel-kit[a2a]"

Outbound calls wrap the official A2A client:

from a2a_otel_kit.adapters.a2a import TracingClient

client = TracingClient.wrap(real_client, observability)

async for event in client.send_message(request):
    ...

Inbound JSON-RPC / REST requests wrap the official request handler:

from a2a_otel_kit.adapters.a2a import TracingRequestHandler

request_handler = TracingRequestHandler.wrap(
    real_handler,
    observability,
)

The adapter records fixed low-cardinality operation metadata only. It does not record agent names, message bodies, artifact content, arbitrary headers, URLs, or exception text.

Streaming operations own their inner iterators explicitly and emit exactly one terminal outcome for exhaustion, exception, cancellation, or early close.

See the complete A2A integration guide.

MCP integration

Install:

uv add "a2a-otel-kit[mcp]"

Instrument public Streamable HTTP boundaries:

import httpx
from mcp.client.streamable_http import streamable_http_client

from a2a_otel_kit.adapters.mcp import (
    TracingASGIMiddleware,
    TracingAsyncTransport,
)

transport = TracingAsyncTransport.wrap(
    httpx.AsyncHTTPTransport(),
    observability,
)

mcp_asgi_app = TracingASGIMiddleware.wrap(
    fastmcp.streamable_http_app(),
    observability,
)

async with httpx.AsyncClient(transport=transport) as http_client:
    async with streamable_http_client(
        url,
        http_client=http_client,
    ) as streams:
        ...

Only traceparent and tracestate are propagated. MCP arguments, results, bodies, arbitrary headers, URLs, and exception text are not captured.

See MCP integration.

Vendor-neutral by design

a2a-otel-kit stops at the OpenTelemetry boundary:

Agent / MCP service
        │
        ▼
   a2a-otel-kit
        │
     OTLP/HTTP
        │
        ▼
OpenTelemetry Collector
   ├── Tempo
   ├── Datadog
   ├── Jaeger-compatible backend
   └── deployment-owned destinations

Collector deployment, vendor routing, credentials, retention, and backend configuration belong to the consuming platform.

No observability-vendor SDK is imported by this package.

Governance runtime telemetry

An optional adapter can convert an existing StructuredEvent into the closed runtime-telemetry contract used by verifiable-ai-governance.

                         ┌──▶ OpenTelemetry / OTLP
Agent ─▶ a2a-otel-kit ───┤
                         └──▶ Governance runtime evidence

Delivery is intentionally explicit. Calling Observability.emit_event() never performs unexpected governance network I/O.

The governance adapter re-sanitizes attributes, keeps credentials outside safe-to-represent settings, reuses event identifiers across retries, and requires HTTPS for non-loopback endpoints.

See Governance integration.

Architecture

The package follows an enforced dependency direction:

src/a2a_otel_kit/
├── domain/       # telemetry vocabulary, sanitization, errors
├── application/  # settings and consumer-facing ports
├── adapters/     # OTel, W3C, A2A, MCP, governance
└── entrypoints/  # explicit composition facade and logging

entrypoints ──▶ application ──▶ domain
adapters    ──▶ application / domain
domain      ──▶ no outer layer

Important design properties:

• Importing the package performs no I/O.
• No global OpenTelemetry tracer provider is installed.
• Each configured Observability instance owns its lifecycle.
• Optional A2A and MCP SDKs remain outside inner layers.
• Protocol adapters instrument public boundaries.
• Privacy rules live below transport-specific adapters.
• Architecture rules are validated by repository tooling.

Read Architecture and the ADRs.

What this is - and what it is not

Verification

The repository verifies more than importability:

• Unit tests cover sanitization, lifecycle, correlation, concurrency, cancellation, streaming, and privacy.
• Loopback integration tests exercise the official A2A HTTP routes and FastMCP Streamable HTTP over real TCP sockets.
• An opt-in Collector integration exports a span and verifies positive receipt from Collector output.
• CI exercises the minimum and newest bounded A2A/MCP SDK versions on Python 3.13 and 3.14.
• Release artifacts are inspected and smoke-tested before publication.

Run the default quality gate:

uv sync --frozen
uv run pytest
uv run python scripts/quality_gate.py

Run protocol integration tests:

uv run pytest --no-cov -m integration \
  tests/integration/test_a2a_http.py \
  tests/integration/test_mcp_streamable_http.py

Run the OpenTelemetry Collector receipt test:

install -d -m 0777 .collector-receipts
install -m 0666 /dev/null .collector-receipts/traces.jsonl

docker compose -f compose.collector.yml up -d

A2A_OTEL_KIT_COLLECTOR_ENDPOINT=http://127.0.0.1:4318/v1/traces \
A2A_OTEL_KIT_COLLECTOR_RECEIPT_FILE=.collector-receipts/traces.jsonl \
uv run pytest --no-cov -m integration \
  tests/integration/test_collector_otlp.py

docker compose -f compose.collector.yml down --volumes --remove-orphans

The Collector test verifies positive receipt by requiring the exported span and service name to appear in Collector output. Endpoint reachability or a successful exporter flush alone is not treated as proof of delivery.

Documentation

Start with the documentation index.

Importable adoption examples are available under examples/.

Compatibility

• Python: >=3.13,<3.15
• a2a-sdk: >=1.1,<2.0
• mcp: >=1.28,<2.0
• OpenTelemetry SDK/exporter: >=1.43,<2.0

The declared optional dependency ranges are the compatibility contract. CI checks both minimum and newest bounded resolutions.

Limitations

Deliberately out of scope:

• A2A gRPC trace-context continuity is not verified.
• MCP stdio is not instrumented.
• Legacy MCP SSE is not instrumented.
• Collector deployment and retention are not owned by the library.
• Vendor-specific backend configuration is not owned by the library.
• OTLP authentication headers are resolved during configuration; dynamic per-request credential rotation is not provided.

These are boundaries, not hidden unsupported paths.

Releases

The package is published to PyPI using GitHub Actions and PyPI Trusted Publishing.

Build and verify locally:

uv build --out-dir dist
uv run python scripts/verify_release_artifacts.py --dist-dir dist

See CHANGELOG.md and the release runbook in DEVELOPMENT.md.

License

MIT. See LICENSE.