This guide walks you from an empty Observatory to a live trace flowing in from your first agent. Plan on 10–15 minutes.Documentation Index
Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.flowx.ai/llms.txt
Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.
Prerequisites
- An Observatory instance (managed cloud, or self-hosted)
- Python 3.12 or newer
- An LLM provider key (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, or Ollama)
- Permission to create projects in your Observatory organization and workspace
Steps
Create a project
Sign in to Observatory and open Projects. Click Add Project, give it a name, and confirm. Observatory creates the project and an API key in the same step.
Copy your API key
On the Home page, the API key panel shows the key for the selected organization and workspace. Click Copy and store the value as the
FLOWX_OBSERVATORY_API_KEY environment variable in your app, alongside your organization, workspace, and project IDs.Install the SDK
Add the SDK to your Python project:The distribution is
flx-observatory-lib; you import it as flowxobservatory. The SDK ships an event queue and a background consumer that batches events to POST /api/report. You don’t need to manage the connection yourself.Instrument an agent
Decorate the function that runs your agent with The string argument names the agent and is what appears in the Agent column on the LLM Calls page.
@agent. The SDK captures inputs, outputs, timings, and any nested chains or tool calls automatically.Run the agent and confirm traces
Invoke the agent once with realistic input. The SDK flushes events every few seconds.Open Observability → Traces in Observatory. Within ~30 seconds you should see the run, agent name, model, duration, and token count.
You see a row for your run with status
success, the right agent name, and a non-zero duration.Validate the rest of the platform
Once one trace lands, the rest of Observatory has data to work with:Analytics
p50/p95 latency, cost by model, error rate.
Risk Dashboard
The 6-dimensional risk score updates automatically.
Compliance heatmap
Controls start evaluating against the new evidence.
ROI overview
Configure baselines to start producing ROI numbers.
Troubleshooting
No traces appear after 30 seconds
No traces appear after 30 seconds
- Confirm
FLOWX_OBSERVATORY_API_KEYis set in the environment your app actually reads from (not just your shell). - Check the app logs for
flowxobservatoryerrors — connection refused usually meansFLOWX_OBSERVATORY_API_URLpoints at the wrong host or is missing the scheme. - Confirm the project you’re looking at in the UI matches the API key you exported.
Traces show but the agent name is empty
Traces show but the agent name is empty
The function must be decorated with
@agent("name") (not bare @agent). The string is what populates the Agent column.Token counts are zero
Token counts are zero
Token counting requires the provider’s response metadata. If you’re calling a custom or proxied endpoint that strips usage fields, Observatory has nothing to count. See Event reporting for the rules.
Related resources
SDK decorators
Full reference for
@agent, @chain, and @tool.Observability overview
What you can do once traces are flowing.

