Querying Spans

Span queries help you extract data from your traces into DataFrames for evaluation

How to Run a Query

You can query for data from the traces collected in Phoenix using the Client. To simply get DataFrames of spans, you can simply ask for a DataFrame. Each row of the DataFrame with be a span that matches the filter criteria and time range passed in. If you leave the parameters blank, you will get all the spans.

import phoenix as px

# You can query for spans with the same filter conditions as in the UI
px.Client().get_spans_dataframe("span_kind == 'CHAIN'")

You can also query for data using our query DSL (domain specific language). Below is an example of how to pull all retriever spans and select the input value. The output of this query is a DataFrame that contains the input values for all retriever spans.

import phoenix as px
from phoenix.trace.dsl import SpanQuery

query = SpanQuery().where(
    # Filter for the `RETRIEVER` span kind.
    # The filter condition is a string of valid Python boolean expression.
    "span_kind == 'RETRIEVER'",
).select(
    # Extract the span attribute `input.value` which contains the query for the
    # retriever. Rename it as the `input` column in the output dataframe.
    input="input.value",
)

# The Phoenix Client can take this query and return the dataframe.
px.Client().query_spans(query)

DataFrame Index By default, the result DataFrame is indexed by span_id, and if .explode() is used, the index from the exploded list is added to create a multi-index on the result DataFrame. For the special retrieval.documents span attribute, the added index is renamed as document_position.

How to Specify a Project

By default all queries are executed against the default project or the project set via the PHOENIX_PROJECT_NAME environment variable. If you choose to pull from a different project, all methods on the Client have an optional parameter named project_name

import phoenix as px
from phoenix.trace.dsl import SpanQuery

# Get spans from a project
px.Client().get_spans_dataframe(project_name="<my-project>")

# Using the query DSL
query = SpanQuery().where("span_kind == 'CHAIN'").select(input="input.value")
px.Client().query_spans(query, project_name="<my-project>")

Querying for Retrieved Documents

Let's say we want to extract the retrieved documents into a DataFrame that looks something like the table below, where input denotes the query for the retriever, reference denotes the content of each document, and document_position denotes the (zero-based) index in each span's list of retrieved documents.

Note that this DataFrame can be used directly as input for the Retrieval (RAG) Relevance evaluations.

context.span_id	document_position	input	reference
5B8EF798A381	0	What was the author's motivation for writing ...	In fact, I decided to write a book about ...
5B8EF798A381	1	What was the author's motivation for writing ...	I started writing essays again, and wrote a bunch of ...
...	...	...	...
E19B7EC3GG02	0	What did the author learn about ...	The good part was that I got paid huge amounts of ...

We can accomplish this with a simple query as follows. Also see Predefined Queries for a helper function executing this query.

from phoenix.trace.dsl import SpanQuery

query = SpanQuery().where(
    # Filter for the `RETRIEVER` span kind.
    # The filter condition is a string of valid Python boolean expression.
    "span_kind == 'RETRIEVER'",
).select(
    # Extract the span attribute `input.value` which contains the query for the
    # retriever. Rename it as the `input` column in the output dataframe.
    input="input.value",
).explode(
    # Specify the span attribute `retrieval.documents` which contains a list of
    # objects and explode the list. Extract the `document.content` attribute from
    # each object and rename it as the `reference` column in the output dataframe.
    "retrieval.documents",
    reference="document.content",
)

# The Phoenix Client can take this query and return the dataframe.
px.Client().query_spans(query)

How to Explode Attributes

In addition to the document content, if we also want to explode the document score, we can simply add the document.score attribute to the .explode() method alongside document.content as follows. Keyword arguments are necessary to name the output columns, and in this example we name the output columns as reference and score. (Python's double-asterisk unpacking idiom can be used to specify arbitrary output names containing spaces or symbols. See here for an example.)

query = SpanQuery().explode(
    "retrieval.documents",
    reference="document.content",
    score="document.score",
)

How to Apply Filters

The .where() method accepts a string of valid Python boolean expression. The expression can be arbitrarily complex, but restrictions apply, e.g. making function calls are generally disallowed. Below is a conjunction filtering also on whether the input value contains the string 'programming'.

query = SpanQuery().where(
    "span_kind == 'RETRIEVER' and 'programming' in input.value"
)

Filtering Spans by Evaluation Results

Filtering spans by evaluation results, e.g. score or label, can be done via a special syntax. The name of the evaluation is specified as an indexer on the special keyword evals. The example below filters for spans with the incorrect label on their correctness evaluations. (See here for how to compute evaluations for traces, and here for how to ingest those results back to Phoenix.)

query = SpanQuery().where(
    "evals['correctness'].label == 'incorrect'"
)

How to Extract Attributes

Span attributes can be selected by simply listing them inside .select() method.

query = SpanQuery().select(
    "input.value",
    "output.value,
)

Renaming Output Columns

Keyword-argument style can be used to rename the columns in the dataframe. The example below returns two columns named input and output instead of the original names of the attributes.

query = SpanQuery().select(
    input="input.value",
    output="output.value,
)

Arbitrary Output Column Names

If arbitrary output names are desired, e.g. names with spaces and symbols, we can leverage Python's double-asterisk idiom for unpacking a dictionary, as shown below.

query = SpanQuery().select(**{
    "Value (Input)": "input.value",
    "Value (Output)": "output.value,
})

Advanced Usage

Concatenating

The document contents can also be concatenated together. The query below concatenates the list of document.content with \n\n (double newlines), which is the default separator. Keyword arguments are necessary to name the output columns, and in this example we name the output column as reference. (Python's double-asterisk unpacking idiom can be used to specify arbitrary output names containing spaces or symbols. See here for an example.)

query = SpanQuery().concat(
    "retrieval.documents",
    reference="document.content",
)

Special Separators

If a different separator is desired, say \n************\n, it can be specified as follows.

query = SpanQuery().concat(
    "retrieval.documents",
    reference="document.content",
).with_concat_separator(
    separator="\n************\n",
)

Using Parent ID as Index

This is useful for joining a span to its parent span. To do that we would first index the child span by selecting its parent ID and renaming it as span_id. This works because span_id is a special column name: whichever column having that name will become the index of the output DataFrame.

query = SpanQuery().select(
    span_id="parent_id",
    output="output.value,
)

Joining a Span to Its Parent

To do this, we would provide two queries to Phoenix which will return two simultaneous dataframes that can be joined together by pandas. The query_for_child_spans uses parent_id as index as shown in Using Parent ID as Index, and px.Client().query_spans() returns a list of dataframes when multiple queries are given.

import pandas as pd

pd.concatenate(
    px.Client().query_spans(
        query_for_parent_spans,
        query_for_child_spans,
    ),
    axis=1,        # joining on the row indices
    join="inner",  # inner-join by the indices of the dataframes
)

How to use Data for Evaluation

Extract the Input and Output from LLM Spans

To learn more about extracting span attributes, see Extracting Span Attributes.

from phoenix.trace.dsl import SpanQuery

query = SpanQuery().where(
    "span_kind == 'LLM'",
).select(
    input="input.value",
    output="output.value,
)

# The Phoenix Client can take this query and return a dataframe.
px.Client().query_spans(query)

Retrieval (RAG) Relevance Evaluations

To extract the dataframe input for Retrieval (RAG) Relevance evaluations, we can apply the query described in the Example, or leverage the helper function implementing the same query.

Q&A on Retrieved Data Evaluations

To extract the dataframe input to the Q&A on Retrieved Data evaluations, we can use a helper function or use the following query (which is what's inside the helper function). This query applies techniques described in the Advanced Usage section.

import pandas as pd
from phoenix.trace.dsl import SpanQuery

query_for_root_span = SpanQuery().where(
    "parent_id is None",   # Filter for root spans
).select(
    input="input.value",   # Input contains the user's question
    output="output.value", # Output contains the LLM's answer
)

query_for_retrieved_documents = SpanQuery().where(
    "span_kind == 'RETRIEVER'",  # Filter for RETRIEVER span
).select(
    # Rename parent_id as span_id. This turns the parent_id
    # values into the index of the output dataframe.
    span_id="parent_id",
).concat(
    "retrieval.documents",
    reference="document.content",
)

# Perform an inner join on the two sets of spans.
pd.concat(
    px.Client().query_spans(
        query_for_root_span,
        query_for_retrieved_documents,
    ),
    axis=1,
    join="inner",
)

Pre-defined Queries

Phoenix also provides helper functions that executes predefined queries for the following use cases.

If you need to run the query against a specific project, you can add the project_name as a parameter to any of the pre-defined queries

Retrieved Documents

The query shown in the example can be done more simply with a helper function as follows. The output DataFrame can be used directly as input for the Retrieval (RAG) Relevance evaluations.

from phoenix.session.evaluation import get_retrieved_documents

retrieved_documents = get_retrieved_documents(px.Client())
retrieved_documents

Q&A on Retrieved Data

To extract the dataframe input to the Q&A on Retrieved Data evaluations, we can use the following helper function.

from phoenix.session.evaluation import get_qa_with_reference

qa_with_reference = get_qa_with_reference(px.Client())
qa_with_reference

The output DataFrame would look something like the one below. The input contains contains the question, the output column contains the answer, and the reference column contains a concatenation of all the retrieved documents. This helper function assumes that the questions and answers are the input.value and output.value attributes of the root spans, and the list of retrieved documents are contained in a direct child span of the root span. (The helper function applies the techniques described in the Advanced Usage section.)

context.span_id	input	output	reference
CDBC4CE34	What was the author's trick for ...	The author's trick for ...	Even then it took me several years to understand ...
...	...	...	...

context.span_id

input

output

reference

CDBC4CE34

What was the author's trick for ...

The author's trick for ...

Even then it took me several years to understand ...

...

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