OpenTelemetry Routing Semantics

Praxis AI can add AI routing decisions to the request trace created and exported by Praxis core. Build the proxy with:

cargo build --release -p praxis-ai-proxy --features opentelemetry

The feature is disabled by default. It does not install an exporter or parse OpenTelemetry environment variables. Configure exporting, propagation, sampling, and request lifecycle tracing through Praxis core.

After intelligent_route successfully selects a provider, the feature emits a short routing.select child span. The span contains bounded routing identity, admission, locality, rank, tier, and overlay revision attributes. It never records request or response bodies, prompts, credentials, authorization headers, cookies, or session keys.

After provider_route validates the edge-selected candidate and resolves it to a provider-local backend cluster, the feature emits a short provider.route child span. The span records the resolved backend cluster the request was routed to; it is not proof that a downstream endpoint, pod, or model server successfully served the request. It contains:

• provider.id: the configured provider-boundary identifier for this listener. This is a configuration value, not necessarily the mTLS peer identity.
• provider.backend.cluster: the configured backend cluster the candidate resolved to.
• provider.route.model: the configured model accepted for the resolved route.
• provider.route.candidate_id: the edge-selected candidate ID that was validated and resolved.
• overlay.revision: present only when the edge supplied a serving overlay revision that passed syntax and trust-boundary validation. It is correlation evidence only, not a provider-local config revision and not an authorization decision.

Like routing.select, this span never records request or response bodies, prompts, credentials, authorization headers, cookies, session keys, or raw request identifiers.

The division of responsibility is intentional:

Edge Praxis core request span
  |
  +-- routing.select          (Praxis AI, intelligent_route)
  `-- upstream hop            (Praxis core)

Provider Praxis core request span
  |
  +-- provider.route          (Praxis AI, provider_route)
  `-- upstream hop            (Praxis core)

Each semantic decision span is short-lived and is a sibling of the later transport span within the same request. When trace context is propagated between gateways, Praxis core connects the edge provider-hop client span to the provider request span.

Praxis core owns the complete HTTP span lifetime and transport boundaries at both the edge and the provider-local listener. Praxis AI records only the semantic decisions it makes at each hop. This prevents duplicate request roots, conflicting trace propagation, and multiple exporter runtimes.

Agentic callouts follow the same ownership rule. When a listener enables the core trace_context filter, Praxis AI projects only its typed TraceContext into isolated web-search, OGX file-search, OGX file-resolution, and MCP child requests. Praxis core then emits the same x-request-id and W3C trace ID with a fresh span ID for every outbound hop. No ambient request extensions, provider credentials, or MCP authorization assertions are copied into trace fields.