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Tracing Smolagents

Smolagents is a lightweight agent framework that emphasizes minimalism and composability.

MLflow Tracing integrates with Smolagents to capture streamlined traces of lightweight agent workflows. Enable it with mlflow.smolagents.autolog.

note

MLflow auto-tracing only supports synchronous calls. Asynchronous API and streaming methods are not traced.

Prerequisites​

To use MLflow Tracing with Smolagents, you need to install MLflow and the relevant Smolagents packages.

For development environments, install the full MLflow package with Databricks extras and Smolagents:

Bash
pip install --upgrade "mlflow[databricks]>=3.1" smolagents openai

The full mlflow[databricks] package includes all features for local development and experimentation on Databricks.

note

MLflow 3 is recommended for the best tracing experience.

Before running the examples, you'll need to configure your environment:

For users outside Databricks notebooks: Set your Databricks environment variables:

Bash
export DATABRICKS_HOST="https://your-workspace.cloud.databricks.com"
export DATABRICKS_TOKEN="your-personal-access-token"

For users inside Databricks notebooks: These credentials are automatically set for you.

API Keys: Ensure your LLM provider API keys are configured. For production environments, use AI Gateway or Databricks secrets instead of hardcoded values for secure API key management.

Bash
export OPENAI_API_KEY="your-openai-api-key"
# Add other provider keys as needed

Example usage​

note

On serverless compute clusters, autologging for genAI tracing frameworks is not automatically enabled. You must explicitly enable autologging by calling the appropriate mlflow.<library>.autolog() function for the specific integrations you want to trace.

Python
import mlflow

mlflow.smolagents.autolog()

from smolagents import CodeAgent, LiteLLMModel
import mlflow

# Turn on auto tracing for Smolagents by calling mlflow.smolagents.autolog()
mlflow.smolagents.autolog()

model = LiteLLMModel(model_id="openai/gpt-4o-mini", api_key=API_KEY)
agent = CodeAgent(tools=[], model=model, add_base_tools=True)

result = agent.run(
    "Could you give me the 118th number in the Fibonacci sequence?",
)

Run your Smolagents workflow as usual. Traces will appear in the experiment UI.

Token tracking usage​

MLflow logs token usage for each Agent callto the mlflow.chat.tokenUsage attribute. The total token usage throughout the trace is available in the token_usage field of the trace info object.

Python
import json
import mlflow

mlflow.smolagents.autolog()

model = LiteLLMModel(model_id="openai/gpt-4o-mini", api_key=API_KEY)
agent = CodeAgent(tools=[], model=model, add_base_tools=True)

result = agent.run(
    "Could you give me the 118th number in the Fibonacci sequence?",
)

# Get the trace object just created
last_trace_id = mlflow.get_last_active_trace_id()
trace = mlflow.get_trace(trace_id=last_trace_id)

# Print the token usage
total_usage = trace.info.token_usage
print("== Total token usage: ==")
print(f"  Input tokens: {total_usage['input_tokens']}")
print(f"  Output tokens: {total_usage['output_tokens']}")
print(f"  Total tokens: {total_usage['total_tokens']}")

# Print the token usage for each LLM call
print("\n== Detailed usage for each LLM call: ==")
for span in trace.data.spans:
    if usage := span.get_attribute("mlflow.chat.tokenUsage"):
        print(f"{span.name}:")
        print(f"  Input tokens: {usage['input_tokens']}")
        print(f"  Output tokens: {usage['output_tokens']}")
        print(f"  Total tokens: {usage['total_tokens']}")

Disable auto-tracing​

Disable with mlflow.smolagents.autolog(disable=True) or globally with mlflow.autolog(disable=True).

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