Imported from jeremylongshore/tons-of-skills-marketplace (
skills/.curated/anth-observability/SKILL.md). Install upstream withnpx skills add jeremylongshore/tons-of-skills-marketplace --skill anth-observability. Copyright stays with the author (MIT).
Anthropic Observability
Overview
Instrument Claude API calls with structured logging, Prometheus metrics, and cost tracking. Every API response includes usage data and rate limit headers — capture these for dashboards and alerting.
Structured Logging
import anthropic
import logging
import time
import json
logger = logging.getLogger("claude")
def create_with_logging(client: anthropic.Anthropic, **kwargs) -> anthropic.types.Message:
start = time.monotonic()
request_meta = {
"model": kwargs.get("model"),
"max_tokens": kwargs.get("max_tokens"),
"tool_count": len(kwargs.get("tools", [])),
"stream": kwargs.get("stream", False),
}
try:
response = client.messages.create(**kwargs)
duration_ms = int((time.monotonic() - start) * 1000)
logger.info(json.dumps({
"event": "claude.request",
"request_id": response._request_id,
"model": response.model,
"input_tokens": response.usage.input_tokens,
"output_tokens": response.usage.output_tokens,
"cache_read_tokens": getattr(response.usage, "cache_read_input_tokens", 0),
"stop_reason": response.stop_reason,
"duration_ms": duration_ms,
"content_blocks": len(response.content),
}))
return response
except anthropic.APIStatusError as e:
duration_ms = int((time.monotonic() - start) * 1000)
logger.error(json.dumps({
"event": "claude.error",
"status": e.status_code,
"error_type": getattr(e, "type", "unknown"),
"duration_ms": duration_ms,
"request_id": e.response.headers.get("request-id", "unknown"),
}))
raise
Prometheus Metrics
from prometheus_client import Counter, Histogram, Gauge
claude_requests = Counter(
"claude_requests_total", "Total Claude API requests",
["model", "stop_reason", "status"]
)
claude_latency = Histogram(
"claude_latency_seconds", "Claude API latency",
["model"], buckets=[0.5, 1, 2, 5, 10, 30, 60]
)
claude_tokens = Counter(
"claude_tokens_total", "Token usage",
["model", "direction"] # direction: input|output|cache_read
)
claude_cost = Counter(
"claude_cost_usd", "Estimated cost in USD",
["model"]
)
claude_rate_limit_remaining = Gauge(
"claude_rate_limit_remaining", "Remaining rate limit",
["dimension"] # dimension: requests|tokens
)
def track_metrics(response, duration: float):
model = response.model
claude_requests.labels(model=model, stop_reason=response.stop_reason, status="ok").inc()
claude_latency.labels(model=model).observe(duration)
claude_tokens.labels(model=model, direction="input").inc(response.usage.input_tokens)
claude_tokens.labels(model=model, direction="output").inc(response.usage.output_tokens)
# Cost estimation
pricing = {"claude-haiku-4-20250514": (0.80, 4.0), "claude-sonnet-4-20250514": (3.0, 15.0)}
rates = pricing.get(model, (3.0, 15.0))
cost = (response.usage.input_tokens * rates[0] + response.usage.output_tokens * rates[1]) / 1e6
claude_cost.labels(model=model).inc(cost)
Key Metrics Dashboard
| Metric | Description | Alert Threshold |
|---|---|---|
claude_requests_total{status="error"} |
Error count | > 5% of total |
claude_latency_seconds p99 |
Tail latency | > 10s |
claude_cost_usd daily |
Daily spend | > 80% budget |
claude_rate_limit_remaining{dimension="requests"} |
RPM headroom | < 10% remaining |
claude_tokens_total{direction="output"} rate |
Output throughput | Spike detection |
Usage API (Server-Side)
# Anthropic's Usage & Cost API for billing reconciliation
# GET https://api.anthropic.com/v1/usage
# Returns daily token usage and cost per model
Error Handling
| Observability Gap | Risk | Fix |
|---|---|---|
| No request_id logged | Can't debug with support | Capture response._request_id |
| Missing cost tracking | Budget surprise | Track per-request cost |
| No latency histogram | Can't spot slow queries | Add Prometheus/Datadog histograms |
Prerequisites
- Define SLOs, alert owners, budget and rate-limit thresholds, approved metric labels, and retention rules for telemetry.
- Configure authenticated server-side access through a secret manager and use a sandbox workspace with synthetic requests to verify instrumentation.
- Establish a redaction/filter policy before enabling logs, traces, dashboards, or usage reconciliation; prompts, responses, secrets, and personal data are never telemetry fields.
Instructions
- Instrument the request boundary with request ID, model, status, stop reason, token aggregates, cache counters, and duration while excluding content and high-cardinality identifiers.
- Emit success and failure metrics for authentication, 4xx/5xx, 429, timeout, latency, spend, and remaining rate-limit headroom. Validate labels against an allowlist and cap cardinality.
- Test dashboards and alerts with synthetic success, timeout, rate-limit, permission, and malformed-response fixtures. Verify the alert path without sending live customer data.
- Reconcile usage through the approved authenticated server-side API on a bounded schedule, compare aggregate totals, and alert on unexplained divergence or budget breach.
- Canary telemetry changes, then promote with owner approval. If redaction, cardinality, or retention checks fail, disable the new sink, restore the prior configuration, and preserve only a redacted receipt.
Output
Produce an observability receipt containing instrumentation version, metric/label allowlist, synthetic test results, alert thresholds, aggregate usage/cost/latency/error outcomes, retention policy, canary scope, approval, and rollback reference. Exclude prompts, responses, API keys, user IDs, and raw exception bodies.
Examples
Send synthetic fixture-request-001 through a staging client and assert request_id_present=1; content_fields=0; labels_allowlisted=1; inject a synthetic 429 and verify the alert fires. Record telemetry=pass; retention=24h; rollback=metrics-v1 without recording the fixture text.
Resources
Next Steps
For incident response, see anth-incident-runbook.