Anthropic Monitoring & Observability with OpenTelemetry

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 accountwith an active ingestion key- Self-hosted SigNoz instance

• Internet access to send telemetry data to SigNoz Cloud

• An AnthropicAPI account with a working API Key pip

installed 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_KEY

with 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>

is the name of your service<service_name>

<region>

: YourSigNoz Cloud region<your-ingestion-key>

: Your SigNozingestion 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)

is the name of your service<service_name>

→ SigNoz Cloud trace endpoint with appropriateOTEL_EXPORTER_TRACES_ENDPOINT

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

→ Your SigNozSIGNOZ_INGESTION_KEY

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)
)
handler = LoggingHandler(level=logging.INFO, logger_provider=logger_provider)
logging.basicConfig(level=logging.INFO, handlers=[handler])

logger = logging.getLogger(__name__)

is the name of your service<service_name>

→ SigNoz Cloud endpoint with appropriateOTEL_EXPORTER_LOGS_ENDPOINT

region:https://ingest.<region>.signoz.cloud:443/v1/logs

→ Your SigNozSIGNOZ_INGESTION_KEY

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__)

SystemMetricsInstrumentor().instrument()
HTTPXClientInstrumentor().instrument()

is the name of your service<service_name>

→ SigNoz Cloud endpoint with appropriateOTEL_EXPORTER_METRICS_ENDPOINT

region:https://ingest.<region>.signoz.cloud:443/v1/metrics

→ Your SigNozSIGNOZ_INGESTION_KEY

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_KEY

with 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.

source & further reading

signoz.io — original article