Agents SDK tracing is on by default, know the three ways to turn it off

TL;DR

Decide your tracing posture before production: leave it on while debugging, then disable it or route spans to your own backend for sensitive workloads. The env var is the simplest global kill switch; the RunConfig flag covers single sensitive runs.

Steps

1. Decide your tracing posture before production: leave it on while debugging, then disable it or route spans to your own backend for sensitive workloads. The env var is the simplest global kill switch; the RunConfig flag covers single sensitive runs. Do not assume traces are local, they are exported unless you turn them off.

When to use

You are seeing this: Do not assume traces are local, they are exported unless you turn them off. Use this skill when you run into "Agents SDK tracing is on by default, know the three ways to turn it off".

When not to use

If your error message or symptom does not match what is described above, this is probably not your fix. Search for your exact error text instead of forcing this one to fit.

Versions

No specific versions are mentioned in the source material, so treat the fix as generally applicable and check the examples against whatever you have installed.

Why this happens

The original report does not dig into a root cause. It documents the symptom and the fix that resolved it.

Source: The official Agents SDK tracing docs confirm the tracing default. Tracing is enabled by default, collecting LLM generations, tool calls, handoffs, guardrails, and custom events into traces viewable on the Traces dashboard. It can be disabled globally with the OPENAIAGENTSDISABLETRACING env var, in code with settracingdisabled, or per run with RunConfig tracingdisabled. Tracing is unavailable for organizations under a Zero Data Retention policy.

Verified resolution: Decide your tracing posture before production: leave it on while debugging, then disable it or route spans to your own backend for sensitive workloads. The env var is the simplest global kill switch; the RunConfig flag covers single sensitive runs. Do not assume traces are local, they are exported unless you turn them off.

Source URL: https://github.com/openai/openai-agents-python/blob/main/docs/tracing.md