Agent skill · software engineering · microsoft
otel
OpenTelemetry guidance for VS Code agent experiences. Use when changing Agent Host telemetry, local Copilot Chat telemetry, provider-native spans or metrics, OTel settings and managed policy, trace persistence/export, or monitoring documentation.
Why this skill is useful
Provides specific OpenTelemetry instrumentation patterns and conventions for the Copilot Chat extension that the AI wouldn't reliably generate on its own.
What it needs
About 5k tokens when loaded. Last updated 2026-08-07. 188,455 stars on the source repository.
What this skill does
OpenTelemetry in VS Code Start by identifying the execution surface. VS Code has separate OTel pipelines with different owners and configuration: Surface Process and producer Configuration Authoritative VS Code document --- --- --- --- Agent Host sessions (Copilot, Claude, Codex) Provider-native telemetry routed by the Agent Host utility process chat.agentHost.otel. src/vs/platform/agentHost/OTEL.md Local Copilot Chat Copilot Chat extension host and IOTelService github.copilot.chat.otel. extensions/copilot/docs/monitoring/agentmonitoring.md Do not combine these pipelines or assume that a setting for one configures another. Current architecture Agent Host is the current execution architecture for Copilot, Claude, and Codex agent sessions. It owns routing, optional trace interception and SQLite persistence, resource normalization, and cross-provider trace context. Each provider owns its native instrumentation. The extension-host Copilot CLI source remains as a fallback when Agent Host is unavailable and to support legacy-session migration. It is normally hidden when Agent Host is available and is not the current Agent Host architecture. Do not use it as a model for new work. Local Copilot Chat remains a separate user-visible extension-host surface. Its foreground chat, LLM, tool, hook, metric, and event instrumentation continues to use IOTelService under extensions/copilot/src/platform/otel/. Runtime version discipline Copilot's native OTel signal contract lives in github/copilot-agent-runtime, not in VS Code's TypeScript attribute constants. Before auditing or changing the integration: 1. Read the @github/copilot-sdk version from the root importer (.) of pnpm-lock.yaml and the bundled runtime version from copilotRuntimeVersion in the root package.json. 2. Resolve the matching immutable runtime tag and commit. 3. Read the runtime monitoring reference and implementation at that revision. 4. …
How to use it
Reference it in AdaL, Claude Code, Cursor or any coding agent — nothing to install:
@skills microsoft/otel