Why Monitor the Anthropic API?
Anthropic monitoring gives you production-level visibility into your Claude API applications, tracking token usage, request latency, error rates, and costs across every model call. This guide shows you how to instrument Anthropic Claude with OpenTelemetry and export traces, logs, and metrics to SigNoz, so you can observe model performance and debug issues in real time.
With this setup, SigNoz gives you correlated traces, logs, and metrics in unified dashboards, making it straightforward to identify slow Claude API responses, detect rate limit errors, track per-request token consumption, and configure alerts before issues affect your users.
Prerequisites
- SigNoz setup (choose one):
- SigNoz Cloud account with an active ingestion key
- Self-hosted SigNoz instance
- Internet access to send telemetry data to SigNoz Cloud
- An Anthropic API account with a working API Key
pipinstalled for managing Python packages- (Optional but recommended) A Python virtual environment to isolate dependencies
Monitoring Anthropic
No-code auto-instrumentation is recommended for quick setup with minimal code changes. It's ideal when you want to get observability up and running without modifying your application code and are leveraging standard instrumentor libraries.
Step 1: Install the necessary packages in your Python environment.
pip install \
opentelemetry-distro \
opentelemetry-exporter-otlp \
opentelemetry-instrumentation-httpx \
opentelemetry-instrumentation-system-metrics \
openinference-instrumentation-anthropic
Step 2: Add Automatic Instrumentation
opentelemetry-bootstrap --action=install
Step 3: Configure logging level
To ensure logs are properly captured and exported, configure the root logger to emit logs at the INFO level or higher:
import logging
logging.getLogger().setLevel(logging.INFO)
This sets the minimum log level for the root logger to INFO, which ensures that logger.info() calls and higher severity logs (WARNING, ERROR, CRITICAL) are captured by the OpenTelemetry logging auto-instrumentation and sent to SigNoz.
Step 4: Run an example
import anthropic
client = anthropic.Anthropic()
message = client.messages.create(
model="claude-3-7-sonnet-20250219",
max_tokens=1000,
messages=[
{
"role": "user",
"content": "What is signoz"
}
]
)
print(message.content)
📌 Note: Before running this code, ensure that you have set the environment variable
ANTHROPIC_API_KEYwith your generated API key.
Step 5: Run your application with auto-instrumentation
OTEL_RESOURCE_ATTRIBUTES="service.name=<service_name>" \
OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT="https://ingest.<region>.signoz.cloud:443" \
OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_HEADERS="signoz-ingestion-key=<your-ingestion-key>" \
OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_PROTOCOL=grpc \
OTEL_TRACES_EXPORTER=otlp \
OTEL_METRICS_EXPORTER=otlp \
OTEL_LOGS_EXPORTER=otlp \
OTEL_PYTHON_LOG_CORRELATION=true \
OTEL_PYTHON_LOGGING_AUTO_INSTRUMENTATION_ENABLED=true \
opentelemetry-instrument <your_run_command>
<service_name>is the name of your service<region>: Your SigNoz Cloud region<your-ingestion-key>: Your SigNoz ingestion key- Replace
<your_run_command>with the actual command you would use to run your application. For example:python main.py
Using self-hosted SigNoz? Most steps are identical. To adapt this guide, update the endpoint and remove the ingestion key header as shown in Cloud → Self-Hosted.
Code-based instrumentation gives you fine-grained control over your telemetry configuration. Use this approach when you need to customize resource attributes, sampling strategies, or integrate with existing observability infrastructure.
Step 1: Install the necessary packages in your Python environment.
pip install \
anthropic \
opentelemetry-api \
opentelemetry-sdk \
opentelemetry-exporter-otlp \
opentelemetry-instrumentation-httpx \
opentelemetry-instrumentation-system-metrics \
openinference-instrumentation-anthropic
Step 2: Import the necessary modules in your Python application
Traces:
from openinference.instrumentation.anthropic import AnthropicInstrumentor
from opentelemetry import trace
from opentelemetry.sdk.resources import Resource
from opentelemetry.sdk.trace import TracerProvider
from opentelemetry.sdk.trace.export import BatchSpanProcessor
from opentelemetry.exporter.otlp.proto.http.trace_exporter import OTLPSpanExporter
Logs:
from opentelemetry.sdk._logs import LoggerProvider, LoggingHandler
from opentelemetry.sdk._logs.export import BatchLogRecordProcessor
from opentelemetry.exporter.otlp.proto.http._log_exporter import OTLPLogExporter
from opentelemetry._logs import set_logger_provider
import logging
Metrics:
from opentelemetry.sdk.metrics import MeterProvider
from opentelemetry.exporter.otlp.proto.http.metric_exporter import OTLPMetricExporter
from opentelemetry.sdk.metrics.export import PeriodicExportingMetricReader
from opentelemetry import metrics
from opentelemetry.instrumentation.system_metrics import SystemMetricsInstrumentor
from opentelemetry.instrumentation.httpx import HTTPXClientInstrumentor
Step 3: Set up the OpenTelemetry Tracer Provider to send traces directly to SigNoz Cloud
from opentelemetry.sdk.resources import Resource
from opentelemetry.sdk.trace import TracerProvider
from opentelemetry.sdk.trace.export import BatchSpanProcessor
from opentelemetry.exporter.otlp.proto.http.trace_exporter import OTLPSpanExporter
from opentelemetry import trace
import os
resource = Resource.create({"service.name": "<service_name>"})
provider = TracerProvider(resource=resource)
span_exporter = OTLPSpanExporter(
endpoint= os.getenv("OTEL_EXPORTER_TRACES_ENDPOINT"),
headers={"signoz-ingestion-key": os.getenv("SIGNOZ_INGESTION_KEY")},
)
processor = BatchSpanProcessor(span_exporter)
provider.add_span_processor(processor)
trace.set_tracer_provider(provider)
<service_name>is the name of your serviceOTEL_EXPORTER_TRACES_ENDPOINT→ SigNoz Cloud trace endpoint with appropriate region:https://ingest.<region>.signoz.cloud:443/v1/tracesSIGNOZ_INGESTION_KEY→ Your SigNoz ingestion key
Using self-hosted SigNoz? Most steps are identical. To adapt this guide, update the endpoint and remove the ingestion key header as shown in Cloud → Self-Hosted.
Step 4: Instrument Anthropic using AnthropicInstrumentor and the configured Tracer Provider
from openinference.instrumentation.anthropic import AnthropicInstrumentor
AnthropicInstrumentor().instrument(tracer_provider=provider)
📌 Important: Place this code at the start of your application logic — before any Anthropic functions are called or used — to ensure telemetry is correctly captured.
Step 5: Setup Logs
import logging
from opentelemetry._logs import set_logger_provider
from opentelemetry.sdk._logs import LoggerProvider, LoggingHandler
from opentelemetry.sdk._logs.export import BatchLogRecordProcessor
from opentelemetry.exporter.otlp.proto.http._log_exporter import OTLPLogExporter
import os
logger_provider = LoggerProvider(resource=resource)
set_logger_provider(logger_provider)
otlp_log_exporter = OTLPLogExporter(
endpoint= os.getenv("OTEL_EXPORTER_LOGS_ENDPOINT"),
headers={"signoz-ingestion-key": os.getenv("SIGNOZ_INGESTION_KEY")},
)
logger_provider.add_log_record_processor(
BatchLogRecordProcessor(otlp_log_exporter)
)
# Attach OTel logging handler to root logger
handler = LoggingHandler(level=logging.INFO, logger_provider=logger_provider)
logging.basicConfig(level=logging.INFO, handlers=[handler])
logger = logging.getLogger(__name__)
<service_name>is the name of your serviceOTEL_EXPORTER_LOGS_ENDPOINT→ SigNoz Cloud endpoint with appropriate region:https://ingest.<region>.signoz.cloud:443/v1/logsSIGNOZ_INGESTION_KEY→ Your SigNoz ingestion key
Using self-hosted SigNoz? Most steps are identical. To adapt this guide, update the endpoint and remove the ingestion key header as shown in Cloud → Self-Hosted.
Step 6: Setup Metrics
from opentelemetry.sdk.resources import Resource
from opentelemetry.sdk.metrics import MeterProvider
from opentelemetry.exporter.otlp.proto.http.metric_exporter import OTLPMetricExporter
from opentelemetry.sdk.metrics.export import PeriodicExportingMetricReader
from opentelemetry import metrics
from opentelemetry.instrumentation.system_metrics import SystemMetricsInstrumentor
import os
resource = Resource.create({"service.name": "<service-name>"})
metric_exporter = OTLPMetricExporter(
endpoint= os.getenv("OTEL_EXPORTER_METRICS_ENDPOINT"),
headers={"signoz-ingestion-key": os.getenv("SIGNOZ_INGESTION_KEY")},
)
reader = PeriodicExportingMetricReader(metric_exporter)
metric_provider = MeterProvider(metric_readers=[reader], resource=resource)
metrics.set_meter_provider(metric_provider)
meter = metrics.get_meter(__name__)
# turn on out-of-the-box metrics
SystemMetricsInstrumentor().instrument()
HTTPXClientInstrumentor().instrument()
<service_name>is the name of your serviceOTEL_EXPORTER_METRICS_ENDPOINT→ SigNoz Cloud endpoint with appropriate region:https://ingest.<region>.signoz.cloud:443/v1/metricsSIGNOZ_INGESTION_KEY→ Your SigNoz ingestion key
Using self-hosted SigNoz? Most steps are identical. To adapt this guide, update the endpoint and remove the ingestion key header as shown in Cloud → Self-Hosted.
📌 Note: SystemMetricsInstrumentor provides system metrics (CPU, memory, etc.), and HTTPXClientInstrumentor provides outbound HTTP request metrics such as request duration. These are not Anthropic-specific metrics. Anthropic does not expose metrics as part of their SDK. If you want to add custom metrics to your Anthropic application, see Python Custom Metrics.
Step 7: Run an example
import anthropic
client = anthropic.Anthropic()
message = client.messages.create(
model="claude-3-7-sonnet-20250219",
max_tokens=1000,
messages=[
{
"role": "user",
"content": "What is signoz"
}
]
)
print(message.content)
📌 Note: Before running this code, ensure that you have set the environment variable
ANTHROPIC_API_KEYwith your generated API key.
View Anthropic API Traces, Logs & Metrics in SigNoz
Your Anthropic commands should now automatically emit traces, logs, and metrics.
You should be able to view traces in Signoz Cloud under the traces tab:
When you click on a trace in SigNoz, you'll see a detailed view of the trace, including all associated spans, along with their events and attributes.
You should be able to view logs in Signoz Cloud under the logs tab. You can also view logs by clicking on the “Related Logs” button in the trace view to see correlated logs:
When you click on any of these logs in SigNoz, you'll see a detailed view of the log, including attributes:
You should be able to see Anthropic related metrics in Signoz Cloud under the metrics tab:
When you click on any of these metrics in SigNoz, you'll see a detailed view of the metric, including attributes:
Anthropic API Monitoring Dashboard
You can also check out our custom Anthropic API dashboard here which provides specialized visualizations for monitoring your Anthropic API usage in applications. The dashboard includes pre-built charts specifically tailored for LLM usage, along with import instructions to get started quickly.
