LiveKit docs › Agent Observability › Overview

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# Observability overview

> An overview of observability features for LiveKit Agents.

## Overview

Monitor and analyze your agent's behavior with comprehensive observability tools. Use built-in LiveKit Cloud insights to view transcripts, traces, logs, and audio recordings, or collect custom data with data hooks for integration with external systems.

> ℹ️ **Note**
> 
> Agent observability is only available for LiveKit Cloud projects. It works for agents deployed to LiveKit Cloud and for self-hosted agents that connect to LiveKit Cloud media servers. It doesn't work with self-hosted media servers or entirely self-hosted deployments.

## Observability components

Monitor agent sessions, collect metrics, and analyze behavior with these observability tools.

| Component | Description | Use cases |
| **Insights in LiveKit Cloud** | Built-in observability stack in LiveKit Cloud with transcripts, traces, logs, and audio recordings in a unified timeline for each agent session. | Viewing session transcripts, analyzing agent behavior, and debugging issues. |
| **Data hooks** | Collect session recordings, transcripts, metrics, and other data within the LiveKit Agents SDK for custom logging and integration with external systems. Includes [OpenTelemetry](https://docs.livekit.io/deploy/observability/data.md#opentelemetry-integration) support for exporting traces to any compatible backend. | Custom data collection, integration with external observability tools, and exporting data to your own systems. |
| **Log drains** (LiveKit Cloud) | Forward runtime logs (stdout/stderr) from agents deployed to LiveKit Cloud to external monitoring services like Datadog, CloudWatch, Sentry, and New Relic. | Server-level logging, crash debugging, cross-replica log aggregation, and long-term retention. |
| **Logs** | View runtime, build, and session logs for your deployed agents using the LiveKit CLI or the Cloud dashboard. | Tailing runtime logs, viewing build output, and accessing per-session logs. |

## In this section

- **[Insights in LiveKit Cloud](https://docs.livekit.io/deploy/observability/insights.md)**: View transcripts, traces, logs, and audio recordings in LiveKit Cloud.

- **[Data hooks](https://docs.livekit.io/deploy/observability/data.md)**: Collect metrics, session reports, and export traces via OpenTelemetry.

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This document was rendered at 2026-06-07T11:32:19.645Z.
For the latest version of this document, see [https://docs.livekit.io/deploy/observability.md](https://docs.livekit.io/deploy/observability.md).

To explore all LiveKit documentation, see [llms.txt](https://docs.livekit.io/llms.txt).