# How to Trace Agent Responses on DigitalOcean Gradient™ AI Platform

DigitalOcean Gradient™ AI Platform lets you build fully-managed AI agents with knowledge bases for retrieval-augmented generation, multi-agent routing, guardrails, and more, or use serverless inference to make direct requests to popular foundation models.

Agent Tracing shows a step-by-step timeline of how your agent processes each prompt, from receiving the input to generating the final response. Each trace includes: token usage, processing times, session and trace IDs, and accessed resources such as knowledge bases, agent routing, and functions. Trace storage is enabled by default for both newly created and existing agents.

## View Traces

You can access traces from the agent’s **Observability** tab. Go to the **Traces and conversation logs** section and click **View log stream** to open the log stream window where you can view traces at three levels of granularity:

- **Sessions** display the complete set of interactions (traces) with your agent, including all prompts and responses within a single session.
- **Traces** display individual actions (spans) taken during an interaction, including the prompt, response, and all processing steps.
- **Spans** display information about the individual action taken by the agent, such as a tool call, knowledge base retrieval, or function execution.

To list traces by individual sessions, traces, or spans, click their respective tabs. The view defaults to **Sessions**, which lists all sessions for the agent. You can click on the **Traces** or **Spans** tab to see more details, including IDs, timestamps, and processing times. This view is useful for quickly scanning through the session’s interactions.

![Traces overview page showing a trace flow, with the right panel displaying Document Search details including raw text input and retrieved chunks.](https://docs.digitalocean.com/screenshots/gradient-ai-platform/traces-overview.39b727cff352c94e22f005ef076cadc57d4af56e78c944e4a8e9d98deb1439cb.png)

To open a session, in the **Sessions** tab, click a session from the list. This opens the **Messages** tab which shows a conversation log and a waterfall chart of all the traces for that session.

![Conversation log messages screen showing a message tree for an agent session, with a highlighted agent response and a metrics panel on the right.](https://docs.digitalocean.com/screenshots/gradient-ai-platform/traces-messages.3ef0da3444ea5300438180c7c807f18cc0783aad87f93a6f255a96abd0ee511c.png)

You can click on any of the nodes to see more details about that step in the trace, and then page through the session by clicking the left and right arrows at the top of the diagram.

### Latency Views

The **Latency** tab provides additional insights into the agent’s performance.

To view the latency for each step in the session, click the **Latency** tab. This shows a timeline of the session’s processing times. You can click on individual nodes in the timeline to see more details about that step. This can help you identify bottlenecks or delays in the agent’s processing.

![Latency view of conversation log messages showing timing bars, the agent, and guardrail steps, with the right panel displaying LLM parameters.](https://docs.digitalocean.com/screenshots/gradient-ai-platform/traces-latency.8ff3b3e2183d53ae60b96f942ce5964d3fc9b359a6bf6cf7de1cbb0bb32410e0.png)

## Export Traces

Exporting session and tracing logs lets you download session or trace data as a `.csv` file for offline analysis or archiving.

To begin exporting data, go to the [DigitalOcean Control Panel](https://cloud.digitalocean.com), in the left menu, click **Agent Platform**, then in **Agent Workspaces**, select the workspace that contains your agent. From the workspace’s **Agents** tab, select the agent, then click the **Observability** tab and scroll to the **Traces and conversation logs** section.

In the log stream window, switch to either the **Sessions** or **Traces** tab, select the interactions you want to export using the checkboxes, then click **Export** to open the **Export Data** window.

In the export window, choose the columns you want to include. You can click **All**, **None**, or **Visible Columns** (the default set), or manually select individual columns using the checkboxes.

After selecting your columns, choose a file name or leave the field blank to use the autogenerated name. Then, click **Export** to download the `.csv` file to your local machine.