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hands-on lab

Getting Started with AI Agent Observability using Vertex AI Agent Engine and Cloud Trace

Difficulty: Beginner
Duration: Up to 1 hour
Students: 2
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Description

Vertex AI Agent Builder provides tools for deploying AI agents, with Agent Garden supplying prebuilt templates and Agent Engine handling their execution. These agents generate logs, metrics, and usage data that can be monitored to understand performance, reliability, and cost.

Monitoring these agents with services like Google Logs Explorer and Google Cloud Monitoring allows teams to evaluate reliability, detect performance issues, and understand cost drivers in production environments. By analyzing structured logs, tracking latency and request metrics, and configuring alerts, teams can build feedback loops that continuously improve agent behavior and efficiency.

In this lab, you will deploy a travel concierge agent, generate and analyze logs in Log Explorer, and create metrics and alerting policies in Cloud Monitoring

Learning objectives

Upon completion of this beginner-level lab, you will be able to:

  • Deploy a pre-built AI travel agent on Google Cloud Platform (GCP)
  • Observe and interpret dashboards and logs generated by the agent in Vertex AI Agent Engine
  • Inspect the agent's traces and sessions to understand its decision-making process and identify potential issues

Intended audience

  • DevOps Engineers​
  • FinOps Practitioners​
  • ML Engineers managing AI workloads

Prerequisites

Familiarity with the following will be beneficial but is not required:

  • Basic understanding of AI agent concepts
  • Google Cloud Monitoring

The following content can be used to fulfill the prerequisites:

Covered topics

Artificial Intelligence
Google Cloud Platform
Artificial Intelligence for Google
Hands-on Lab UUID

Lab steps

0 of 4 steps completed.Use arrow keys to navigate between steps. Press Enter to go to a step if available.
  1. Signing In to the Google Cloud Console
  2. Deploying a Travel Concierge Agent with Vertex AI Agent Engine
  3. Exploring the AI Agent Dashboards and Logs
  4. Monitoring Spans and Traces with Google Cloud Trace Explorer

Lab Rules