Claude Code adds OpenTelemetry tracing for cost and tool calls

On October 26, 2026, a post on DEV Community explained how to turn on the built-in OpenTelemetry export in Anthropic's Claude Code. The setup is straightforward: users set the environment variable CLAUDE_CODE_ENABLE_TELEMETRY=1, select an exporter, and point it at their own collector. Once enabled, Claude Code feeds token usage, cost, commit, pull request, and tool-decision data into the user's own observability stack, with data tagged by model, subagent, Skill, plugin, and MCP server.

The article also clarifies several default limits of the telemetry. Prompt text, tool details, and raw API bodies are turned off by default, and each of these has its own separate opt-in flag. For teams trying to monitor Claude Code usage across the organization, the /usage command only covers local sessions; cross-device comparisons at the team level require telemetry. There is also a deployment caveat: setting OTEL exporter variables in a project's config files has no effect, as they are ignored. As a result, rolling out the feature must be handled through managed settings instead of project-level configuration.