AGNTCon + MCPCon Europe 2026

Agent systems are getting more capable, but they are still hard to operate when a single user request fans out across multiple agents, tools, model calls, queues, and outbound messages. In this session, we will walk through how we built an open observability plugin for OpenClaw (InsightClaw) that turns that opaque execution path into a connected telemetry story using OpenTelemetry.

The talk covers a practical design that combines three signal paths: typed lifecycle hooks for request, agent, tool, and response flow; diagnostics events for model usage, cost, queue, webhook, and stuck-session signals; and optional provider SDK auto-instrumentation for GenAI calls. Together, these produce connected traces, useful operational metrics, and cross-session lineage for handoffs, spawned subagents, and parallel branches.

We will show the trace model we used, the session semantics we had to define for real workflows, and the engineering tradeoffs around payload capture, runtime patching, and correlating control-plane events with agent execution.

We hand coding agents our workspace, our keys, and a shell, then walk away while they run code generated at runtime from untrusted input: files in the repo, docs fetched off the web, output from MCP servers nobody audited. The obvious fix is isolation: give every agent its own kernel. So we start there, running Claude Code, Codex, and others inside sub-second, hardware-isolated microVMs (libkrun/KVM), where even root in the guest is stuck behind the hypervisor's MMU boundary, not just a shared-kernel namespace.

But isolation on its own isn't enough. An isolated agent can still read the .env beside your code, exfiltrate it, wreck your workspace, or abuse a tool you never vetted. So we add defenses, live, one layer at a time: copy-on-write workspace snapshots with a per-file review gate, non-overridable secret exclusions, a DNS-aware egress firewall, a hardened Wolfi guest (custom Go PID 1, dropped capabilities, seccomp, no-new-privs), and an MCP proxy with Cedar authorization profiles. We finish on the attack surface most tools forget: the security tool's own config.

It's all Apache-2.0. The lesson carries to any agent you run: isolation is the floor, not the ceiling.