"Unknown" spans in Phoenix with the Autogen agent framework typically result from the auto-instrumentation wrapping many internal methods, which can create extra or less-informative spans. There is currently no built-in configuration to filter or group these spans at the instrumentation level; each wrapped method call results in a separate span, and "unknown" kind appears when the span type can't be determined from context or attributes.
To reduce or clean up these spans, you can use the `suppress_tracing` context manager to manually suppress tracing in specific code blocks, but this requires explicit intervention in your code. For deeper investigation, review which methods are being wrapped and consider if you can limit instrumentation scope or add more semantic attributes to clarify span types. Otherwise, changes to span grouping or filtering would require upstream changes to the instrumentation logic itself.
Sources:
- <https://github.com/Arize-ai/openinference/issues/2167|Autogen Agentchat tracing verbosity and span kinds>
