IBM watsonx Orchestrate

Monitor agents and tools built with IBM watsonx Orchestrate ADK in Langfuse. Orchestrate has a native integration that forwards telemetry (traces, spans, logs) to Langfuse for rich observability.

What is IBM watsonx Orchestrate? IBM watsonx Orchestrate ADK is a framework that lets developers build and publish custom skills (actions) that watsonx Orchestrate can execute within automated workflows.

What is Langfuse? Langfuse is a platform for monitoring, debugging, and analyzing your AI applications. It provides a set of tools and services to help you monitor, debug, and analyze your AI applications. Use Langfuse Cloud (hosted by Langfuse, free tier, no infrastructure to run) or self-host it.

Prerequisites

Langfuse Cloud (https://cloud.langfuse.com) or a self-hosted Langfuse instance
IBM watsonx Orchestrate ADK installed

Quick start (CLI)

Configure Orchestrate to send telemetry to Langfuse. Replace placeholders with your values.

orchestrate settings observability langfuse configure \
  --url "https://cloud.langfuse.com/api/public/otel" \
  --api-key "sk-lf-0000-0000-0000-0000-0000" \
  --health-uri "https://cloud.langfuse.com" \
  --config-json '{"public_key": "pk-lf-0000-0000-0000-0000-0000"}'

Note

For self-hosted Langfuse, set --url to https://<your-langfuse-host>/api/public/otel and --health-uri to https://<your-langfuse-host>.
You can also provide --project-id (or -p) if not part of the config file.

Alternative: YAML config file

Create a YAML file and reference it from the CLI. Example:

spec_version: v1
kind: langfuse
project_id: default
api_key: sk-lf-00000-00000-00000-00000-00000
url: https://cloud.langfuse.com/api/public/otel
host_health_uri: https://cloud.langfuse.com
config_json:
  public_key: pk-lf-00000-00000-00000-00000-00000
  mask_pii: true

Apply it:

orchestrate settings observability langfuse configure --config-file=path_to_file.yml

Enable telemetry in Orchestrate

To enable IBM's native observability framework, start the Orchestrate server with the --with-ibm-telemetry or -i flag, then go to https://localhost:8765 in your browser.

Start the Orchestrate server with telemetry enabled, then open the local console:

orchestrate start --with-ibm-telemetry
# or shorthand
orchestrate start -i

# Open the console
# https://localhost:8765

Troubleshooting

Connection/health: Ensure --health-uri responds and the ingest URL points to /api/public/otel
Auth: Verify the api_key (Secret Key) and public_key (Public Key) belong to the same Langfuse project
Self-hosted: Confirm your Langfuse instance is reachable from Orchestrate and TLS is configured correctly

Reference

IBM documentation: Monitoring your LLMs with Langfuse