OpenRouter Observability & Monitoring with OpenTelemetry

What is OpenRouter Observability?

OpenRouter observability gives you full visibility into your LLM API routing across multiple models. This guide walks you through setting up OpenRouter monitoring using OpenTelemetry and exporting traces to SigNoz, so you can track requests, latency, and usage across your OpenRouter applications.

With full OpenRouter observability in SigNoz, you can correlate traces across your AI and LLM workflows, configure alerts on latency and errors, and gain actionable insights to continuously improve reliability and responsiveness. SigNoz brings your OpenRouter telemetry into unified dashboards so you can monitor every model request in one place.

Prerequisites

• A SigNoz Cloud account with an active ingestion key or Self Hosted SigNoz instance
• Internet access to access OpenRouter API and send telemetry data to SigNoz Cloud
• An OpenRouter account and OpenRouter API key. You can get it from the OpenRouter API Keys page.

Set Up OpenRouter Observability with OpenTelemetry

Step 1: Configure broadcasting traces from OpenRouter to OTel Collector

For more information on setting up traces from OpenRouter refer to the OpenRouter broadcast guide.

Enable Broadcast in OpenRouter

Go to Settings > Observability and toggle Enable Broadcast.

Configure OpenTelemetry Collector

Click 'Add Destination +' next to the OpenTelemetry Collector entry

and enter:

• Endpoint: https://ingest.<region>.signoz.cloud:443/v1/traces
• Headers:

{
  "signoz-ingestion-key": "<your-ingestion-key>"
}

• <region>: Your SigNoz Cloud region
• <your-ingestion-key>: Your SigNoz ingestion key

Test and Save

Click Test Connection to verify the setup. Once there is a success message, click the "Add" button.

Once configured, your OpenRouter calls are traced and sent to SigNoz.

Step 2: Use the OpenRouter API

For more information on getting started with OpenRouter in your environment, refer to the OpenRouter quickstart guide.

import requests
import json

response = requests.post(
  url="https://openrouter.ai/api/v1/chat/completions",
  headers={
    "Authorization": "Bearer <OPENROUTER_API_KEY>",
    "HTTP-Referer": "<YOUR_SITE_URL>", # Optional. Site URL for rankings on openrouter.ai.
    "X-Title": "<YOUR_SITE_NAME>", # Optional. Site title for rankings on openrouter.ai.
  },
  data=json.dumps({
    "model": "openai/gpt-5.2", # Optional
    "messages": [
      {
        "role": "user",
        "content": "What is SigNoz?"
      }
    ]
  })
)

fetch('https://openrouter.ai/api/v1/chat/completions', {
  method: 'POST',
  headers: {
    Authorization: 'Bearer <OPENROUTER_API_KEY>',
    'HTTP-Referer': '<YOUR_SITE_URL>', // Optional. Site URL for rankings on openrouter.ai.
    'X-Title': '<YOUR_SITE_NAME>', // Optional. Site title for rankings on openrouter.ai.
    'Content-Type': 'application/json',
  },
  body: JSON.stringify({
    model: 'openai/gpt-5.2',
    messages: [
      {
        role: 'user',
        content: 'What is SigNoz',
      },
    ],
  }),
});

curl https://openrouter.ai/api/v1/chat/completions \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $OPENROUTER_API_KEY" \
  -d '{
  "model": "openai/gpt-5.2",
  "messages": [
    {
      "role": "user",
      "content": "What is SigNoz?"
    }
  ]
}'

View OpenRouter Traces in SigNoz

Once configured, your OpenRouter application automatically emits traces.

OpenRouter traces are available in SigNoz 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.

OpenRouter Monitoring Dashboard

The OpenRouter Dashboard Template provides ready-made visualizations for monitoring OpenRouter usage. It includes pre-built charts for LLM request volume, token usage, and cost, along with import instructions to get started quickly.

Additional resources:

• Set up alerts for high latency or error rates
• Learn more about querying traces
• Explore log correlation