Best Practices for Google ADK Agents
These guides map the operational concerns raised in the official Google ADK documentation to concrete actions you take inside TraptureIQ. Every recommendation here addresses a real failure mode we've seen in production deployments of Google ADK agents.
If you're new, finish Getting Started first. These pages assume you have at least one Google ADK agent registered.
Why these topics
We selected the seven topics that show up most often in:
- ADK GitHub issues and Stack Overflow questions about Google ADK
- The "common pitfalls" and "limitations" sections in the official ADK docs
- Production incidents reported by teams using TraptureIQ as their Google ADK Agent Control Plane
If you only have an hour, read Cost Control, Observability Strategy, and Safety & Guardrails. Those three eliminate the most common production fires.
The seven pillars
| Pillar | Why it matters | ADK concepts covered |
|---|---|---|
| Cost Control | Token spend on Gemini scales superlinearly with conversation length | Context caching, compaction, token budgets |
| Observability Strategy | You can't debug what you can't see — and print() doesn't scale | OpenTelemetry logging, traces, callbacks, metrics |
| Safety & Guardrails | Prompt injection and unsafe outputs are the #1 reason agents get pulled from prod | Authorization patterns, content safety filters, callback validation |
| Session & Memory | Misconfigured state keys cause data leaks across users and apps | user:, app:, temp: prefixes, MemoryService selection |
| Evaluation Strategy | If you don't catch regressions in CI, your users catch them in prod | .test.json files, trajectory evaluation, custom metrics |
| Agent Design | The most common incident: "wrong agent in production" | Naming, tagging, environment separation |
| Tool Usage | ADK has a "one built-in tool per agent" rule that breaks naive designs | AgentTool.create(), bypass_multi_tools_limit, sub-agent composition |
How each page is organized
- The ADK pain point — what the official docs say and where it bites
- The TraptureIQ angle — which module solves it and how to configure
- Checklist — do these in order
- Anti-patterns — common ways teams get this wrong
- References — links to ADK docs and the TraptureIQ module
Quick wins (10 minutes each)
- Turn on context caching for any agent with a system prompt over 2K tokens → Cost Control
- Enable AgentGuard on every customer-facing agent → Safety & Guardrails
- Tag every production agent with
environment:production→ Agent Design - Run the default security eval weekly → Evaluation Strategy
- Set a monthly token budget per agent → Cost Control