google-agents-cli-observability

A guide to monitoring Google Agent Development Kit agents, which are software agents built with Google’s ADK. It covers tracing, prompt-response logs, BigQuery analytics, infrastructure setup, and deployment order.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to add tracing, logging, analytics, or production debugging to an ADK agent, and to prepare infrastructure before deploying it to Agent Runtime.
Why use it?
It clarifies which monitoring features work immediately and which require Terraform-managed cloud resources, helping avoid deployment and ownership conflicts.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/google/agents-cli/google-agents-cli-observability
Any agent
npx skills add google/agents-cli --skill google-agents-cli-observability
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/google/agents-cli

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 132 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,568 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00132 $0.02568
Opus 5 $0.00066 $0.01284
Sonnet 5 $0.00026 $0.00514
Haiku 4.5 $0.00013 $0.00257

Measured yesterday against content hash 8cf17cd2c1a9, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

google-agents-cli-observability scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured yesterday.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/google-agents-cli-observability/SKILL.md · 166 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 166 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

ADK Observability Guide

Cloud Trace works out of the box — no infrastructure needed. Prompt-response logging and BigQuery Agent Analytics require Terraform-provisioned infrastructure (service account, GCS bucket, BigQuery dataset). Run agents-cli infra single-project --project PROJECT_ID to provision these resources. See references/cloud-trace-and-logging.md for details, env vars, and verification commands. If your project isn't scaffolded yet, see /google-agents-cli-scaffold first.

Order of operations for agent_runtime deployments

For deployment_target = agent_runtime, run agents-cli infra single-project before the first agents-cli deploy. The Terraform module owns the entire Reasoning Engine resource (service account, deployment spec, env vars), so applying it after an SDK-based deploy creates a state mismatch Terraform can't reconcile without taking ownership of the whole resource.

Already ran agents-cli deploy? Two options:

  1. Switch to Terraform-managed — delete the SDK-deployed Reasoning Engine, then run agents-cli infra single-project and agents-cli deploy (sessions and in-flight state are lost).
  2. Keep the SDK-deployed instance — skip infra single-project and set the observability env vars by re-running agents-cli deploy --update-env-vars "KEY=VALUE,..."; deploy matches the existing Reasoning Engine by display name and updates it in place, preserving env vars set outside the deploy. You must also grant its service account the telemetry IAM roles the Terraform module would otherwise provision: roles/storage.admin (write completions to the logs bucket), roles/logging.logWriter, roles/cloudtrace.agent, plus roles/bigquery.dataOwner + roles/bigquery.jobUser when scaffolded with --bq-analytics. The full set lives in deployment/terraform/single-project/iam.tf (from app_sa_roles) and telemetry.tf. Terraform-managed env vars aren't available in this mode.

Reference Files

File Contents
references/cloud-trace-and-logging.md Scaffolded project details — Terraform-provisioned resources, environment variables, verification commands, enabling/disabling locally
references/bigquery-agent-analytics.md BQ Agent Analytics plugin — enabling, key features, GCS offloading, tool provenance
references/feedback-mechanism.md Adding a user-feedback endpoint — request model, structured logging, log sink → BigQuery

Read the full file on GitHub · 166 lines

Files

What ships with it

3 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. yesterday First seen · 166 lines · 132 tokens per session scan A 8cf17cd2c1a9

Subscribe to this mod's changes

google-agents-cli-observability is a skill published in the GitHub repository google/agents-cli (5,759 stars, last pushed 4d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 132 tokens to every session and 2,568 once invoked, about $0.0007 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.