OpenInference is an open standard for tracing and evaluating AI applications.
Modern AI systems are built from many components: models, agents, retrievers, tools, orchestration frameworks, vector databases, and evaluation systems. Without shared standards, observability data becomes fragmented across vendors and frameworks.
OpenInference provides a common schema for representing AI system behavior consistently across tools and platforms.
It standardizes concepts such as:
- traces
- spans
- model inputs and outputs
- tool calls
- retrieval events
- metadata
- evaluation signals
This makes it possible to instrument an application once and send telemetry data to multiple observability or evaluation systems without vendor lock-in.
OpenInference plays a similar role for AI systems that OpenTelemetry plays for infrastructure observability: it creates shared conventions that allow ecosystems and tooling to interoperate consistently.
For teams building production AI systems, standardization reduces integration complexity and makes observability data portable across frameworks, vendors, and workflows.