Skip to main content
Patter ships opt-in OpenTelemetry tracing that covers the four hot spots on the voice pipeline: STT, LLM, TTS, and tool calls. Every span carries the current getpatter.call.id so you can group by call in your backend.

​
Enable tracing

Tracing is disabled by default. Install the optional dependency and set the env flag: 
pip install 'getpatter[tracing]'
export PATTER_OTEL_ENABLED=1
export OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT=http://localhost:4318   # any OTLP/HTTP collector
Then call init_tracing once at process start — typically from the same module that creates your Patter client: 
from getpatter.observability import init_tracing

init_tracing(
    service_name="my-voice-bot",
    otlp_endpoint="http://localhost:4318",
    resource_attributes={"deployment.environment": "staging"},
)
If PATTER_OTEL_ENABLED is not set, init_tracing returns False and every span becomes a no-op — zero cost when disabled.

​
Emitted spans

Span nameFiresAttributes
getpatter.sttOne per final transcriptgetpatter.stt.text_len, getpatter.stt.confidence
getpatter.llmOne per LLM iteration (incl. tool rounds)getpatter.llm.iteration, getpatter.llm.history_size
getpatter.ttsOne per synthesized sentencegetpatter.tts.text_len
getpatter.toolOne per tool invocationgetpatter.tool.name, getpatter.tool.transport

​
PII hygiene

Patter never exports user utterances, tool payloads, or LLM content as span attributes. Only sizes, counts, and identifiers are emitted — traces are safe to ship to a shared Jaeger / Honeycomb / Grafana Cloud instance.

​
Shutdown

Call shutdown_tracing() during graceful shutdown to flush any pending spans: 
from getpatter.observability import shutdown_tracing

shutdown_tracing()

​
Troubleshooting

No spans appear → confirm PATTER_OTEL_ENABLED=1 is set in the process that calls init_tracing. Quick check: 
from getpatter.observability import is_enabled
print(is_enabled())
Collector refuses spans → the endpoint defaults to OTLP/HTTP on port 4318. If you’re running the gRPC-only OTel Collector image, switch to otel/opentelemetry-collector-contrib or enable the HTTP receiver in your collector config.
Tracing is currently a Python-only feature. TypeScript parity is on the roadmap.