# Helicone Observability [Helicone](https://helicone.ai) is an open-source LLM observability platform that helps you monitor, analyze, and optimize your AI applications. Built-in observability tracks every request automatically, providing comprehensive insights into performance, costs, user behavior, and model usage without requiring additional instrumentation. ## Setup The Helicone provider is available in the `@helicone/ai-sdk-provider` package. Install it with: Setting up Helicone: 1. Create a Helicone account at [helicone.ai](https://helicone.ai) 2. Get your API key from the [Helicone Dashboard](https://us.helicone.ai/settings/api-keys) 3. Set your API key as an environment variable: ```bash filename=".env" HELICONE_API_KEY=your-helicone-api-key ``` 4. Use Helicone in your application: ```javascript import { createHelicone } from '@helicone/ai-sdk-provider'; import { generateText } from 'ai'; const helicone = createHelicone({ apiKey: process.env.HELICONE_API_KEY, }); // Use the provider with any supported model: https://helicone.ai/models const result = await generateText({ model: helicone('claude-4.5-haiku'), prompt: 'Hello world', }); console.log(result.text); ``` That's it! Your requests are now being logged and monitored through Helicone with automatic observability. [→ Learn more about Helicone AI Gateway](https://docs.helicone.ai) ## Key Observability Features Helicone provides comprehensive observability for your AI applications with zero additional instrumentation: **Automatic Request Tracking** - Every request is logged automatically with full request/response data - Track latency, tokens, costs, and model performance in real-time - No OpenTelemetry setup or additional configuration required **Analytics Dashboard** - View metrics across all your AI requests: costs, latency, token usage, and error rates - Filter by user, session, model, or custom properties - Identify performance bottlenecks and optimize model selection **User & Session Analytics** - Track individual user behavior and usage patterns - Monitor conversation flows with session tracking - Analyze user engagement and feature adoption **Cost Monitoring** - Real-time cost tracking per request, user, feature, or model - Budget alerts and cost optimization insights - Compare costs across different models and providers **Debugging & Troubleshooting** - Full request/response logging for every call - Error tracking with detailed context - Search and filter requests to identify issues quickly [→ Learn more about Helicone Observability](https://docs.helicone.ai) ## Observability Configuration ### User Tracking Track individual user behavior and analyze usage patterns across your application. This helps you understand which users are most active, identify power users, and monitor per-user costs: ```javascript import { createHelicone } from '@helicone/ai-sdk-provider'; import { generateText } from 'ai'; const helicone = createHelicone({ apiKey: process.env.HELICONE_API_KEY, }); const result = await generateText({ model: helicone('gpt-4o-mini', { extraBody: { helicone: { userId: 'user@example.com', }, }, }), prompt: 'Hello world', }); ``` **What you can track:** - Total requests per user - Cost per user - Average latency per user - Most common use cases by user segment [→ Learn more about User Metrics](https://docs.helicone.ai/features/advanced-usage/user-metrics) ### Custom Properties Add structured metadata to segment and analyze requests by feature, environment, or any custom dimension. This enables powerful filtering and insights in your analytics dashboard: ```javascript import { createHelicone } from '@helicone/ai-sdk-provider'; import { generateText } from 'ai'; const helicone = createHelicone({ apiKey: process.env.HELICONE_API_KEY, }); const result = await generateText({ model: helicone('gpt-4o-mini', { extraBody: { helicone: { properties: { feature: 'translation', source: 'mobile-app', language: 'French', environment: 'production', }, }, }, }), prompt: 'Translate this text to French', }); ``` **Use cases for custom properties:** - Compare performance across different features or environments - Track costs by product area or customer tier - Identify which features drive the most AI usage - A/B test different prompts or models by tagging experiments [→ Learn more about Custom Properties](https://docs.helicone.ai/features/advanced-usage/custom-properties) ### Session Tracking Group related requests into sessions to analyze conversation flows and multi-turn interactions. This is essential for understanding user journeys and debugging complex conversations: ```javascript import { createHelicone } from '@helicone/ai-sdk-provider'; import { generateText } from 'ai'; const helicone = createHelicone({ apiKey: process.env.HELICONE_API_KEY, }); const result = await generateText({ model: helicone('gpt-4o-mini', { extraBody: { helicone: { sessionId: 'convo-123', sessionName: 'Travel Planning', sessionPath: '/chats/travel', }, }, }), prompt: 'Tell me more about that', }); ``` **Session tracking benefits:** - View complete conversation history in a single timeline - Calculate total cost per session/conversation - Measure session duration and message counts - Identify where users drop off in multi-turn conversations - Debug issues by replaying entire conversation flows [→ Learn more about Sessions](https://docs.helicone.ai/features/sessions) ## Advanced Observability Features ### Tags and Organization Add tags to organize and filter requests in your analytics dashboard: ```javascript import { createHelicone } from '@helicone/ai-sdk-provider'; import { generateText } from 'ai'; const helicone = createHelicone({ apiKey: process.env.HELICONE_API_KEY, }); const result = await generateText({ model: helicone('gpt-4o-mini', { extraBody: { helicone: { tags: ['customer-support', 'urgent'], properties: { ticketId: 'TICKET-789', priority: 'high', department: 'support', }, }, }, }), prompt: 'Help resolve this customer issue', }); ``` **Tags insights:** - Filter and group requests by tags - Track performance across different categories - Identify patterns in tagged requests - Build custom dashboards around specific tags [→ Learn more about Helicone Features](https://docs.helicone.ai) ### Streaming Response Tracking Monitor streaming responses with full observability, including time-to-first-token and total streaming duration: ```javascript import { createHelicone } from '@helicone/ai-sdk-provider'; import { streamText } from 'ai'; const helicone = createHelicone({ apiKey: process.env.HELICONE_API_KEY, }); const result = await streamText({ model: helicone('gpt-4o-mini', { extraBody: { helicone: { userId: 'user@example.com', sessionId: 'stream-session-123', tags: ['streaming', 'content-generation'], }, }, }), prompt: 'Write a short story about AI', }); for await (const chunk of result.textStream) { process.stdout.write(chunk); } ``` **Streaming metrics tracked:** - Time to first token (TTFT) - Total streaming duration - Tokens per second - Complete request/response logging even for streams - User experience metrics for real-time applications - All metadata (sessions, users, tags) tracked for streamed responses ## Resources - [Helicone Documentation](https://docs.helicone.ai) - [AI SDK Provider Package](https://github.com/Helicone/ai-sdk-provider) - [Helicone GitHub Repository](https://github.com/Helicone/helicone) - [Discord Community](https://discord.gg/7aSCGCGUeu) - [Supported Models](https://helicone.ai/models) ## Navigation - [Axiom](/v5/providers/observability/axiom) - [Braintrust](/v5/providers/observability/braintrust) - [Helicone](/v5/providers/observability/helicone) - [Laminar](/v5/providers/observability/laminar) - [Langfuse](/v5/providers/observability/langfuse) - [LangSmith](/v5/providers/observability/langsmith) - [LangWatch](/v5/providers/observability/langwatch) - [Maxim](/v5/providers/observability/maxim) - [Patronus](/v5/providers/observability/patronus) - [Scorecard](/v5/providers/observability/scorecard) - [SigNoz](/v5/providers/observability/signoz) - [Traceloop](/v5/providers/observability/traceloop) - [Weave](/v5/providers/observability/weave) [Full Sitemap](/sitemap.md)