### Motivation
Today config.toml has three different OTEL knobs under `[otel]`:
- `exporter` controls where OTEL logs go
- `trace_exporter` controls where OTEL traces go
- `metrics_exporter` controls where metrics go
Those often (pretty much always?) serve different purposes.
For example, for OpenAI internal usage, the **log exporter** is already
being used for IT/security telemetry, and that use case is intentionally
content-rich: tool calls, arguments, outputs, MCP payloads, and in some
cases user content are all useful there. `log_user_prompt` is a good
example of that distinction. When it’s enabled, we include raw prompt
text in OTEL logs, which is acceptable for the security use case.
The **trace exporter** is a different story. The goal there is to give
OpenAI engineers visibility into latency and request behavior when they
run Codex locally, without sending sensitive prompt or tool data as
trace event data. In other words, traces should help answer “what was
slow?” or “where did time go?”, not “what did the user say?” or “what
did the tool return?”
The complication is that Rust’s `tracing` crate does not make a hard
distinction between “logs” and “trace events.” It gives us one
instrumentation API for logs and trace events (via `tracing::event!`),
and subscribers decide what gets treated as logs, trace events, or both.
Before this change, our OTEL trace layer was effectively attached to the
general tracing stream, which meant turning on `trace_exporter` could
pick up content-rich events that were originally written with logging
(and the `log_exporter`) in mind. That made it too easy for sensitive
data to end up in exported traces by accident.
### Concrete example
In `otel_manager.rs`, this `tracing::event!` call would be exported in
both logs AND traces (as a trace event).
```
pub fn user_prompt(&self, items: &[UserInput]) {
let prompt = items
.iter()
.flat_map(|item| match item {
UserInput::Text { text, .. } => Some(text.as_str()),
_ => None,
})
.collect::<String>();
let prompt_to_log = if self.metadata.log_user_prompts {
prompt.as_str()
} else {
"[REDACTED]"
};
tracing::event!(
tracing::Level::INFO,
event.name = "codex.user_prompt",
event.timestamp = %timestamp(),
// ...
prompt = %prompt_to_log,
);
}
```
Instead of `tracing::event!`, we should now be using `log_event!` and
`trace_event!` instead to more clearly indicate which sink (logs vs.
traces) that event should be exported to.
### What changed
This PR makes the log and trace export distinct instead of treating them
as two sinks for the same data.
On the provider side, OTEL logs and traces now have separate
routing/filtering policy. The log exporter keeps receiving the existing
`codex_otel` events, while trace export is limited to spans and trace
events.
On the event side, `OtelManager` now emits two flavors of telemetry
where needed:
- a log-only event with the current rich payloads
- a tracing-safe event with summaries only
It also has a convenience `log_and_trace_event!` macro for emitting to
both logs and traces when it's safe to do so, as well as log- and
trace-specific fields.
That means prompts, tool args, tool output, account email, MCP metadata,
and similar content stay in the log lane, while traces get the pieces
that are actually useful for performance work: durations, counts, sizes,
status, token counts, tool origin, and normalized error classes.
This preserves current IT/security logging behavior while making it safe
to turn on trace export for employees.
### Full list of things removed from trace export
- raw user prompt text from `codex.user_prompt`
- raw tool arguments and output from `codex.tool_result`
- MCP server metadata from `codex.tool_result` (mcp_server,
mcp_server_origin)
- account identity fields like `user.email` and `user.account_id` from
trace-safe OTEL events
- `host.name` from trace resources
- generic `codex.tool_decision` events from traces
- generic `codex.sse_event` events from traces
- the full ToolCall debug payload from the `handle_tool_call` span
What traces now keep instead is mostly:
- spans
- trace-safe OTEL events
- counts, lengths, durations, status, token counts, and tool origin
summaries
### Summary
Propagate trace context originating at app-server RPC method handlers ->
codex core submission loop (so this includes spans such as `run_turn`!).
This implements PR 2 of the app-server tracing rollout.
This also removes the old lower-level env-based reparenting in core so
explicit request/submission ancestry wins instead of being overridden by
ambient `TRACEPARENT` state.
### What changed
- Added `trace: Option<W3cTraceContext>` to codex_protocol::Submission
- Taught `Codex::submit()` / `submit_with_id()` to automatically capture
the current span context when constructing or forwarding a submission
- Wrapped the core submission loop in a submission_dispatch span
parented from Submission.trace
- Warn on invalid submission trace carriers and ignore them cleanly
- Removed the old env-based downstream reparenting path in core task
execution
- Stopped OTEL provider init from implicitly attaching env trace context
process-wide
- Updated mcp-server Submission call sites for the new field
Added focused unit tests for:
- capturing trace context into Submission
- preferring `Submission.trace` when building the core dispatch span
### Why
PR 1 gave us consistent inbound request spans in app-server, but that
only covered the transport boundary. For long-running work like turns
and reviews, the important missing piece was preserving ancestry after
the request handler returns and core continues work on a different async
path.
This change makes that handoff explicit and keeps the parentage rules
simple:
- app-server request span sets the current context
- `Submission.trace` snapshots that context
- core restores it once, at the submission boundary
- deeper core spans inherit naturally
That also lets us stop relying on env-based reparenting for this path,
which was too ambient and could override explicit ancestry.
Add service name to the app-server so that the app can use it's own
service name
This is on thread level because later we might plan the app-server to
become a singleton on the computer
Summary
- capture the origin for each configured MCP server and expose it via
the connection manager
- plumb MCP server name/origin into tool logging and emit
codex.tool_result events with those fields
- add unit coverage for origin parsing and extend OTEL tests to assert
empty MCP fields for non-MCP tools
- currently not logging full urls or url paths to prevent logging
potentially sensitive data
Testing
- Not run (not requested)
Add per-turn notice when a request is downgraded to a fallback model due
to cyber safety checks.
**Changes**
- codex-api: Emit a ServerModel event based on the openai-model response
header and/or response payload (SSE + WebSocket), including when the
model changes mid-stream.
- core: When the server-reported model differs from the requested model,
emit a single per-turn warning explaining the reroute to gpt-5.2 and
directing users to Trusted
Access verification and the cyber safety explainer.
- app-server (v2): Surface these cyber model-routing warnings as
synthetic userMessage items with text prefixed by Warning: (and document
this behavior).
So that the rest of the codebase (like TUI) don't need to be concerned
whether ChatGPT auth was handled by Codex itself or passed in via
app-server's external auth mode.
Summary
- expose websocket telemetry hooks through the responses client so
request durations and event processing can be reported
- record websocket request/event metrics and emit runtime telemetry
events that the history UI now surfaces
- improve tests to cover websocket telemetry reporting and guard runtime
summary updates
<img width="824" height="79" alt="Screenshot 2026-01-31 at 5 28 12 PM"
src="https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/ea9a7965-d8b4-4e3c-a984-ef4fdc44c81d"
/>
Add metrics capabilities to Codex. The `README.md` is up to date.
This will not be merged with the metrics before this PR of course:
https://github.com/openai/codex/pull/8350
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