This guide demonstrates how to use OpenTelemetry SDK to instrument OpenAI API calls and send traces to TrueFoundry’s OtelCollector. In this example, we’ll show how to instrument a Python application that makes calls to OpenAI’s API using OpenTelemetry’s context managers.
1

Create Tracing Project, API Key and copy tracing code

Follow the instructions in Getting Started to create a tracing project, generate API key and copy the tracing code.
2

Install Dependencies

First, you need to install the following packages:
pip install opentelemetry-api opentelemetry-sdk opentelemetry-exporter-otlp-proto-http python-dotenv openai
3

Add tracing code to Python application

To enable tracing, you’ll need to configure opentelemetry sdk and initialize it. This section shows how to instrument your OpenAI API calls using OpenTelemetry’s context managers. The example demonstrates how to trace a chat completion request with proper attributes.
from opentelemetry import trace
from opentelemetry.sdk.trace import TracerProvider
from opentelemetry.sdk.trace.export import BatchSpanProcessor
from opentelemetry.exporter.otlp.proto.http.trace_exporter import OTLPSpanExporter
from dotenv import load_dotenv
import os
from openai import OpenAI

# Load environment variables from .env file
load_dotenv()

# Setup tracer provider
provider = TracerProvider()
trace.set_tracer_provider(provider)

TFY_API_KEY = os.environ.get("TFY_API_KEY")
# OTLP exporter (HTTP)
otlp_exporter = OTLPSpanExporter(
    endpoint="{enter_your_api_endpoint}/v1/traces",
    headers={
        "Authorization": f"Bearer {TFY_API_KEY}",
        "TFY-Tracing-Project": "<enter_your_tracing_project_fqn>",
    }
)

# Span processor using batch (recommended for production)
span_processor = BatchSpanProcessor(otlp_exporter)
provider.add_span_processor(span_processor)

# Get tracer
tracer = trace.get_tracer(__name__)

# Initialize OpenAI client
client = OpenAI()

def generate_ai_response(input_text):
    with tracer.start_as_current_span("OpenAI-Trace") as span:
        # Set up the chat messages
        input_prompt = [
            {"role": "user", "content": input_text}
        ]
        
        # Add relevant attributes to the span
        span.set_attribute("input.value", input_text)
        span.set_attribute("model.name", "gpt-4")
        span.set_attribute("temperature", 0.7)
        span.set_attribute("gen_ai.prompt.0.role", "user")
        span.set_attribute("gen_ai.prompt.0.content", input_text)

        # Make the API call
        response = client.chat.completions.create(
            messages=input_prompt,
            model="gpt-4",
            temperature=0.7,
        )

        # Add response attributes to the span
        output_content = response.choices[0].message.content
        span.set_attribute("output.value", output_content)
        span.set_attribute("gen_ai.completion.0.role", "assistant")
        span.set_attribute("gen_ai.completion.0.content", output_content)

        return output_content

# Example usage
if __name__ == "__main__":
    input_text = "Explain the concept of AI in 50 words"
    response = generate_ai_response(input_text)
    print(response)
4

Run your application and view logged trace