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PandaProbe supports fully disabling the SDK, making it safe to leave instrumentation in production code that you only want active in certain environments.

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Disable via environment variable

export PANDAPROBE_ENABLED=false
When PANDAPROBE_ENABLED=false:
  • The SDK does not initialize a client
  • pandaprobe.get_client() returns None
  • pandaprobe.flush() and pandaprobe.shutdown() silently do nothing
  • @pandaprobe.trace and @pandaprobe.span decorators pass through transparently (zero overhead)
  • Wrappers return the original client unchanged
  • Integration adapters’ instrument() calls are no-ops
This makes it safe to leave PandaProbe instrumentation in all environments. The SDK adds zero overhead when disabled.

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Disable via init()

import pandaprobe

pandaprobe.init(enabled=False)

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Environment-based configuration

Common pattern using different configurations per environment: 
import os
import pandaprobe

env = os.environ.get("APP_ENV", "development")

pandaprobe.init(
    api_key=os.environ.get("PANDAPROBE_API_KEY"),
    project_name="my-project",
    environment=env,
    enabled=env != "testing",
    debug=env == "development",
)

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Conditional tracing without disabling

If you want the SDK enabled but want to conditionally trace specific operations: 
import pandaprobe

def handle_request(query: str):
    if should_trace(query):
        with pandaprobe.start_trace("agent", input={"messages": [{"role": "user", "content": query}]}) as t:
            return process(query, t)
    else:
        return process(query, None)