Core Assistant is the Google-provided ("Made by Google") agent that handles interactions when users talk to the Gemini Enterprise engine without specifying any other agent.
Core Assistant includes monitoring and observability for tracing and monitoring of operations with user interactions and agent activity. It provides comprehensive observability into execution flow, performance, and usage metrics.
The Core Assistant agent is available automatically with Gemini Enterprise.
Key characteristics of Core Assistant:
- Google-managed: Entirely maintained and managed by Google; you cannot edit its configuration or change the charts and data shown.
- Always available: Automatically provisioned and runs out of the box for Gemini Enterprise agents.
- Access: Viewable through the Google Cloud console.
Through Core Assistant, you can access two primary observability tabs with details of your AI operations: Traces and Metrics.
Prerequisites
Before you begin using Core Assistant, ensure you have the following:
- The Gemini Enterprise Admin role or Google Cloud console Gemini Enterprise User role.
- An existing Gemini Enterprise app configured.
- For Traces functionality, you must turn on OpenTelemetry traces and logs
in your observability settings and have the Cloud Trace User role
(
roles/cloudtrace.user). For more information, see Manage observability settings. *Note: The Metrics functionality is default ON and does not require manual configuration or trace enablement.*
The Traces tab
The Traces tab in Core Assistant provides a chronological summary of trace records showing parent-child execution span details (Agent to Tool, Invoke Agent, and Agent to Model actions). These records help inspect runtime execution flows, inputs, outputs, and locate latent issues.
Traces inside Core Assistant persist for 30 days and require OpenTelemetry traces to be turned on.
For a detailed breakdown of all the fields, visual workflows (graphs and timelines), and metrics logs display in the Traces tab, see Access traces for agents.
The Metrics tab
The Metrics tab provides an operational overview dashboard summarizing sessions, count of agent invocations, traffic, error rates, and detailed connections of tools usage.
Metrics inside Core Assistant persist for 6 weeks (42 days), are default ON, require no configuration, and incur no extra billing costs.
For a comprehensive breakdown of each metric dashboard (Overview metrics dashboard and connected Tools latency metrics), see Access metrics for agents.