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Sentrial supports two ingestion paths. You can use the Sentrial SDK for the richest agent-aware experience, or send OpenTelemetry traces when you already have an OTel pipeline.

Sentrial SDK

Best for new integrations, agent sessions, tool calls, prompt variants, costs, and Sentrial-specific workflows.

OpenTelemetry

Best when your agents already emit OTel spans or you need vendor-neutral collection through an existing collector.

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Which Path Should I Use?

Use the Sentrial SDK when you want the most complete Sentrial experience with minimal mapping:
  • begin() and finish() sessions
  • automatic tool and LLM wrappers
  • convo_id grouping
  • production prompt variant routing with getVariant()
  • automatic run classification after completion
Use OpenTelemetry when you already have traces:
  • existing OTel SDKs or collectors
  • GenAI semantic convention spans
  • multi-vendor observability pipelines
  • gradual migration from another tracing tool
You can use both. For example, call getVariant() from the Sentrial SDK to route a prompt variant, then attach the returned assignment ID to your OTel root span as sentrial.experiment.assignment_id.

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Data Model Mapping

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Recommendation

Start with the Sentrial SDK unless your application already has mature OpenTelemetry traces. Use OTel when you need interoperability — instrument with standard OTel GenAI semantic conventions and add gen_ai.conversation.id on the root span (the single Sentrial-specific extension) so multi-turn runs group into conversations. No sentrial.* attributes are required; they remain only as deprecated fallbacks.

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Next Steps

Quickstart

Install the SDK and track your first agent run.

OpenTelemetry

Send OTLP HTTP traces (JSON or protobuf) to Sentrial.