How to trace Vercel AI Gateway with HoneyHive

Vercel AI Gateway gives you one endpoint for models from many providers, with provider failover, BYOK, and spend tracking. You can send its traces to HoneyHive in two ways:

Route	Code change	Captures
SDK instrumentor	Point your provider SDK (OpenAI, Anthropic, and others) at the gateway and call its instrumentor	Prompts, completions, tool calls, token usage, and gateway cost
AI Gateway drain	None. You configure it in Vercel team settings	Model, provider, token usage, cost, latency, routing, and failover attempts for every gateway request. No prompts or completions

The SDK route traces the apps you instrument, with full content. The drain covers every gateway request on your Vercel team without code changes. You can run both. Vercel’s gateway traces do not include prompt or completion content, so drain events in HoneyHive have empty inputs and outputs.

Quick Start

Point your OpenAI client at the gateway, then instrument as usual. OpenAIInstrumentor patches the SDK, so chat completions, tools, and token usage are traced regardless of the base_url.

AI Gateway exposes an OpenAI-compatible API at https://ai-gateway.vercel.sh/v1. HoneyHive traces the OpenAI SDK, not the gateway, so the OpenAI integration works unchanged. Model IDs use provider/model.

To see where to initialize the tracer for your environment, including AWS Lambda and long-running servers, see Tracer Initialization.

Last tested with honeyhive 1.6.0, openai 3.20.0, and openinference-instrumentation-openai 0.1.61 (September 2026).

pip install "honeyhive[openinference-openai]"

import os
from openai import OpenAI
from honeyhive import HoneyHiveTracer
from openinference.instrumentation.openai import OpenAIInstrumentor

tracer = HoneyHiveTracer.init()  # Reads HH_INGESTION_API_KEY from your environment
OpenAIInstrumentor().instrument(tracer_provider=tracer.provider)

client = OpenAI(
    api_key=os.getenv("AI_GATEWAY_API_KEY"),
    base_url="https://ai-gateway.vercel.sh/v1",
)

response = client.chat.completions.create(
    model="openai/gpt-4o-mini",
    messages=[{"role": "user", "content": "Write a one-sentence bedtime story."}],
)
print(response.choices[0].message.content)

Create an API key in the AI Gateway dashboard. On Vercel deployments, you can use the Vercel OIDC token instead. See Vercel’s authentication docs. The instrumentor captures:

Chat completions - Inputs, outputs, and token usage
Tool / function calls - Arguments and results for each tool invocation
Streaming responses - Streamed completions with aggregated tokens
Gateway response fields - The gateway returns generationId and usage.cost in each response, and they arrive in the event’s config

The same pattern works with any provider SDK that AI Gateway supports and HoneyHive instruments, such as the OpenAI and Anthropic SDKs. Point the SDK at the gateway (https://ai-gateway.vercel.sh/v1 for OpenAI, https://ai-gateway.vercel.sh for Anthropic) and call that SDK’s instrumentor. Raw fetch / curl calls are not autotraced. The AI Gateway drain captures those requests.

AI Gateway drain (no code)

The drain forwards a trace of every gateway request your Vercel team makes, from any app, with no code changes. It needs a Vercel team on the Pro or Enterprise plan. Vercel bills each delivered trace plus trace egress. See Vercel’s trace drain pricing.

Configure the drain

Create a HoneyHive ingestion key

Create an ingestion API key in Settings → Project → API Keys, on the Ingestion tab. The key sets which HoneyHive project receives the traces.

Add an AI Gateway drain

In the Vercel dashboard, go to Team Settings → Drains and click Add Drain. Select AI Gateway as the data type. A Traces drain sends your deployments’ request spans, not AI Gateway requests.

Point the custom endpoint at HoneyHive

Select Custom Endpoint and set:

Field	Value
Endpoint URL	`https://<provider-host>/opentelemetry/v1/traces`
Format	`JSON` or `Protobuf`
Custom Headers	`Authorization: Bearer <HH_INGESTION_API_KEY>`

For US production, the endpoint is https://api.dp1.us.prod.honeyhive.ai/opentelemetry/v1/traces. Use the host shown in your HoneyHive dashboard.

Create the drain and send a request

Click Create Drain, then send any request through AI Gateway, for example with the Quick Start code.

What HoneyHive records

Each gateway request is one OpenTelemetry trace with service.name: ai-gateway. HoneyHive maps its spans to events:

Vercel span	HoneyHive event type	Fields
`<operation> <model>` (root, for example `chat openai/gpt-4o-mini`)	`model`	`config.model`, `config.provider`, `metadata.input_tokens`, `metadata.output_tokens`, `metadata.total_tokens`, latency
`vercel.ai_gateway.routing`	`tool`	Provider filters and ordering
`vercel.ai_gateway.model_attempt <model>`	`model`	Position in the fallback chain and result
`<model> (<provider>)`	`model`	One per upstream provider call, with the provider status code

Gateway-specific attributes arrive in metadata with their original names. Useful ones:

vercel.ai_gateway.cost.total and vercel.ai_gateway.cost.currency - Request cost, as Vercel billed it. Vercel sends the cost as a decimal string, so it arrives in metadata as a string
vercel.ai_gateway.user.id and vercel.ai_gateway.tags - The user ID and tags you attached to the request
vercel.ai_gateway.generation.id - The generation ID in the AI Gateway dashboard
vercel.ai_gateway.credential.type - byok or system
vercel.ai_gateway.api_format - The API the client called: openai-compat for Chat Completions, openresponses-compat for the Responses API
vercel.ai_gateway.api_key.name and vercel.ai_gateway.environment - The AI Gateway key that made the request, and the Vercel environment
gen_ai.response.time_to_first_chunk - Time to first token, in seconds
vercel.ai_gateway.provider - The exact gateway provider slug (for example vertexAnthropic). config.provider holds the OTel provider name instead (for example aws.bedrock)

The drain sends no session attribute, so these events appear in the Events view, not the Sessions view. To find them, filter by service.name = ai-gateway. To see one gateway request, filter by the trace_id metadata field.

Troubleshooting

SDK traces not appearing

Check the instrumentor - Call the instrumentor for your SDK with tracer_provider=tracer.provider before creating the client or making requests
Confirm you use an instrumented SDK - Raw fetch / curl to the gateway is not autotraced. Check the base URL: https://ai-gateway.vercel.sh/v1 for OpenAI, https://ai-gateway.vercel.sh for Anthropic
Check HH_INGESTION_API_KEY - Set it to an ingestion API key

Drain traces not appearing

Data type - The drain must use the AI Gateway data type. A Traces drain forwards only vercel.serverless-runtime and vercel.edge-network spans
Endpoint and header - The URL must end with /opentelemetry/v1/traces, and the header must be exactly Authorization: Bearer <HH_INGESTION_API_KEY>. A wrong key returns 401
Project - The key sets the project. Check the project where you created the key

Agent Frameworks & Platforms

Model Providers

AI Gateways

Coding Agents

Evaluation

How to trace Vercel AI Gateway with HoneyHive

Quick Start

AI Gateway drain (no code)

Configure the drain

What HoneyHive records

Troubleshooting

SDK traces not appearing

Drain traces not appearing

Resources

​Quick Start

​AI Gateway drain (no code)

​Configure the drain

​What HoneyHive records

​Troubleshooting

​SDK traces not appearing

​Drain traces not appearing

​Resources

Quick Start

AI Gateway drain (no code)

Configure the drain

What HoneyHive records

Troubleshooting

SDK traces not appearing

Drain traces not appearing

Resources