Traces, missing Responses although they were successful

API Bugs
1

I found that some Responses don’t show up on traces even though they were successful.

trace_953F833F4D204ACE8F1A4BCACC41E918

This image shows a hierarchical trace view of various agent processes and API calls, each with their respective execution times measured in milliseconds and progress bars displaying relative durations. (Captioned by AI)
This image shows a hierarchical trace view of various agent processes and API calls, each with their respective execution times measured in milliseconds and progress bars displaying relative durations. (Captioned by AI)1702×1970 318 KB

for example the second SearchAgent span, span_4B41515F370F48C1B316A7EF doesn’t show a response.

But in the ingested JSON:

    {
      "parent_id" : "span_7E7E8A9C9E624A0D8BF5C950",
      "object" : "trace.span",
      "span_data" : {
        "name" : "SearchAgent",
        "type" : "agent",
        "tools" : [
          "web_search_preview"
        ],
        "handoffs" : [

        ],
        "output_type" : "str"
      },
      "trace_id" : "trace_953F833F4D204ACE8F1A4BCACC41E918",
      "started_at" : "2025-05-06T20:24:09.196Z",
      "error" : null,
      "ended_at" : "2025-05-06T20:24:18.176Z",
      "id" : "span_4B41515F370F48C1B316A7EF"
    },

here’s the trace.span for the response:

    {
      "ended_at" : "2025-05-06T20:24:18.176Z",
      "started_at" : "2025-05-06T20:24:09.197Z",
      "span_data" : {
        "response_id" : "resp_681a6fe956988191879d0bb306ce6ff305a932d0f32f1422",
        "type" : "response"
      },
      "parent_id" : "span_4B41515F370F48C1B316A7EF",
      "id" : "span_CB751A10FD4B4A9084151B71",
      "object" : "trace.span",
      "trace_id" : "trace_953F833F4D204ACE8F1A4BCACC41E918",
      "error" : null
    },

The response with id resp_681a6fe956988191879d0bb306ce6ff305a932d0f32f1422 does exist if I look at it in the logs.

This image shows a screenshot of a web search log detailing a query about "Ollama LM Studio investment news May 2025," including the user's input, the assistant's summarized search results, and system instructions, all displayed in a dark-themed interface. (Captioned by AI)
This image shows a screenshot of a web search log detailing a query about "Ollama LM Studio investment news May 2025," including the user's input, the assistant's summarized search results, and system instructions, all displayed in a dark-themed interface. (Captioned by AI)1920×2062 179 KB

PS: Admittedly I am doing the ingesting myself, with my own SDK, but that should not change anything.

2

Ok, I uncovered a likely explanation. Apparently the website doesn’t use the span_id for linking traces, but rather uses the time stamps to unique the retrieved span. Because of this the time stamps need to be unique. My exporter was limited to 3 digits after the comma (milliseconds) for seconds for formatting Swift Dates, but the AgentsSDK was sending 6 digits after the comma (microseconds), as String.

Since I changed it to also have microseconds all of the sudden all traces appear correctly.

This image shows a hierarchical trace log of an application named "Test Trace," detailing the execution times of various agents and POST requests in milliseconds, with visual progress bars for each entry. (Captioned by AI)
This image shows a hierarchical trace log of an application named "Test Trace," detailing the execution times of various agents and POST requests in milliseconds, with visual progress bars for each entry. (Captioned by AI)1710×2224 354 KB

So my feedback to OpenAI is that they shouldn’t unique trace spans by time stamp, but rather by id.