Coding Agents Observability

As AI coding agents become integral to software development workflows, understanding their usage patterns, costs, and performance is essential. These guides show how to ship native OpenTelemetry metrics from AI coding agents directly to Amazon CloudWatch using bearer token authentication — no collectors or sidecars required.

Each guide covers end-to-end setup: creating a CloudWatch metrics API key, configuring the agent, deploying pre-built dashboards, and setting up alerting with PromQL.

Guide	Agent	Key Metrics
GitHub Copilot	VS Code extension & CLI	Tokens, sessions, tool calls, edit acceptance, latency
OpenAI Codex	Codex CLI	Tokens, API requests, tool calls, conversation turns, latency

Both guides follow the same pattern: bearer-token auth → direct-to-CloudWatch OTLP → PromQL dashboards & alerts.