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Strands Agents is an open-source AI agent SDK that uses model-driven orchestration to build production-ready, multi-agent systems in a few lines of code. It supports many LLM providers (Amazon Bedrock, OpenAI, Anthropic, and more) and offers multi-agent patterns, custom tool creation, and native AWS integrations.

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Install

pip install arize-phoenix-otel openinference-instrumentation-strands-agents strands-agents openai

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Setup

Set your model provider API key as an environment variable. This example uses OpenAI: 
export OPENAI_API_KEY=[your_key_here]
Strands Agents provides its own OpenTelemetry-based telemetry. The openinference-instrumentation-strands-agents package adds a span processor that transforms Strands’ native spans into OpenInference format for Phoenix. 
from phoenix.otel import HTTPSpanExporter, SimpleSpanProcessor, register
from openinference.instrumentation.strands_agents import StrandsAgentsToOpenInferenceProcessor

# Strands reads the global tracer provider, so start with register() to make
# Phoenix's provider the process-wide default.
tracer_provider = register(
    project_name="strands-agents",
)

# This processor rewrites Strands' native spans into OpenInference spans, so it
# must run before the Phoenix exporter that sends spans to your collector.
tracer_provider.add_span_processor(StrandsAgentsToOpenInferenceProcessor())
tracer_provider.add_span_processor(
    SimpleSpanProcessor(HTTPSpanExporter()),
)
Processor ordering matters. register() sets Phoenix as the global tracer provider for Strands, but it also installs Phoenix’s default exporter-backed processor immediately. Replace that default with StrandsAgentsToOpenInferenceProcessor(), then add the Phoenix exporter back after it so Phoenix receives the transformed OpenInference spans.

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Run Strands Agents

from strands import Agent
from strands.models.openai import OpenAIModel

model = OpenAIModel(model_id="gpt-4o-mini")
agent = Agent(
    model=model,
    system_prompt="You are a helpful assistant.",
)

result = agent("Explain the theory of relativity in simple terms.")

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Observe

Now that you have tracing setup, all invocations of Strands agents — including LLM calls, tool executions, and event loop cycles — will be streamed to your running Phoenix for observability and evaluation.

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Resources