AI SDK
Observability Integrations

Braintrust

Monitoring and tracing LLM applications with Braintrust

Braintrust is an end-to-end platform for building AI applications. When building with the AI SDK, you can integrate Braintrust to log, monitor, and take action on real-world interactions.

Setup

Braintrust natively supports OpenTelemetry and works out of the box with the AI SDK, either via Next.js or Node.js.

Next.js

If you are using Next.js, use the Braintrust exporter with @vercel/otel:

instrumentation
import { registerTelemetry } from 'ai';
import { LegacyOpenTelemetry } from '@ai-sdk/otel';
import { registerOTel } from '@vercel/otel';
import { BraintrustExporter } from 'braintrust';

registerTelemetry(new LegacyOpenTelemetry());

export function register() {
  registerOTel({
    serviceName: 'my-braintrust-app',
    traceExporter: new BraintrustExporter({
      parent: 'project_name:your-project-name',
      filterAISpans: true, // Only send AI-related spans
    }),
  });
}

Traced LLM calls will appear under the Braintrust project or experiment provided in the parent field.

Once the integration is registered, telemetry is captured automatically. You can pass additional metadata via the context option:

import { generateText } from 'ai';
import { openai } from '@ai-sdk/openai';

const result = await generateText({
  model: openai('gpt-6-luna'),
  prompt: 'What is 2 + 2?',
  context: {
    query: 'weather',
    location: 'San Francisco',
  },
});

The integration supports streaming functions like streamText. Each streamed call will produce ai.streamText spans in Braintrust.

import { openai } from '@ai-sdk/openai';
import { streamText } from 'ai';

export async function POST(req: Request) {
  const { prompt } = await req.json();

  const result = await streamText({
    model: openai('gpt-6-luna'),
    prompt,
  });

  return result.toDataStreamResponse();
}

Node.js

If you are using Node.js without a framework, you must configure the NodeSDK directly. In this case, it's more straightforward to use the BraintrustSpanProcessor.

First, install the necessary dependencies:

npm install ai @ai-sdk/openai @ai-sdk/otel braintrust @opentelemetry/sdk-node @opentelemetry/sdk-trace-base zod

Then, set up the OpenTelemetry SDK:

import { NodeSDK } from '@opentelemetry/sdk-node';
import { registerTelemetry, generateText, tool, isStepCount } from 'ai';
import { LegacyOpenTelemetry } from '@ai-sdk/otel';
import { openai } from '@ai-sdk/openai';
import { z } from 'zod';
import { BraintrustSpanProcessor } from 'braintrust';

const sdk = new NodeSDK({
  spanProcessors: [
    new BraintrustSpanProcessor({
      parent: 'project_name:your-project-name',
      filterAISpans: true,
    }),
  ],
});

sdk.start();
registerTelemetry(new LegacyOpenTelemetry());

async function main() {
  const result = await generateText({
    model: openai('gpt-6-luna'),
    messages: [
      {
        role: 'user',
        content: 'What are my orders and where are they? My user ID is 123',
      },
    ],
    tools: {
      listOrders: tool({
        description: 'list all orders',
        inputSchema: z.object({ userId: z.string() }),
        execute: async ({ userId }) =>
          `User ${userId} has the following orders: 1`,
      }),
      viewTrackingInformation: tool({
        description: 'view tracking information for a specific order',
        inputSchema: z.object({ orderId: z.string() }),
        execute: async ({ orderId }) =>
          `Here is the tracking information for ${orderId}`,
      }),
    },
    context: {
      something: 'custom',
      someOtherThing: 'other-value',
    },
    telemetry: {
      functionId: 'my-awesome-function',
    },
    stopWhen: isStepCount(10),
  });

  await sdk.shutdown();
}

main().catch(console.error);

Resources

To see a step-by-step example, check out the Braintrust cookbook.

After you log your application in Braintrust, explore other workflows like:

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