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Google ADK (Agent Development Kit) is Google’s framework for building AI agents powered by Gemini models. Braintrust automatically traces ADK agent executions, capturing agent invocations, tool calls, parallel flows, and multi-step reasoning.
This guide covers manual instrumentation. For quicker setup, use auto-instrumentation.

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Setup

Install the Braintrust SDK: 
pip install braintrust

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Trace with Google ADK

import asyncio

from braintrust.wrappers.adk import setup_adk
from google.adk import Runner
from google.adk.agents import LlmAgent
from google.adk.sessions import InMemorySessionService
from google.genai import types

# Call setup_adk() to enable automatic tracing for all ADK agent interactions
setup_adk(
    project_name="my-adk-project",
)

# Create your ADK agent as normal
def get_weather(city: str) -> dict:
    """Get weather for a city."""
    return {"temperature": 72, "condition": "sunny", "city": city}

def get_current_time() -> str:
    """Get the current time."""
    from datetime import datetime

    return datetime.now().strftime("%I:%M %p")

async def main():
    # Create the agent
    agent = LlmAgent(
        name="weather_time_assistant",
        tools=[get_weather, get_current_time],
        model="gemini-2.5-flash",
        instruction="You are a helpful assistant that can check weather and time.",
    )
    # Create a session service and a runner
    session_service = InMemorySessionService()
    runner = Runner(app_name="weather_app", agent=agent, session_service=session_service)
    # Create a fake session
    user_id = "user123"
    session_id = "session123"
    await session_service.create_session(app_name="weather_app", user_id=user_id, session_id=session_id)
    # Create the message to send
    new_message = types.Content(
        parts=[types.Part(text="What's the weather like in New York?")],
        role="user",
    )
    # Run the agent with the query
    events = runner.run(
        user_id=user_id,
        session_id=session_id,
        new_message=new_message,
    )
    # Process the events and print the agent's response
    for event in events:
        print(event)

if __name__ == "__main__":
    asyncio.run(main())
Example of automatic Google ADK tracing and logs sent to Braintrust

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Avoiding duplicate spans (Go)

Google ADK has built-in OpenTelemetry support that emits spans under the gcp.vertex.agent instrumentation scope. Braintrust drops these by default to avoid duplicating the spans produced by Braintrust’s ADK callbacks (found in trace/contrib/adk). If you’re not using traceadk.AddLLMAgentCallbacks (from the Braintrust ADK package), and you’re instead relying solely on ADK’s native telemetry, opt in to receive those spans: 
// Via option:
braintrust.New(tp, braintrust.EnableBuiltinAdkTraces())

# Via environment variable:
export BRAINTRUST_OTEL_ENABLE_BUILTIN_ADK_TRACES=true

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