Miguel Valdes

Monitor your claude usage

2 min read

Lately I’ve been using Anthropic Claude via their official CLI Claude Code a lot to manage and code basically everything in my life as the AI Overlords intended. One interesting (or annoying) feature is how quickly tokens get consumed, so I wanted to track my consumption patterns and understand my historical AI usage. While browsing Reddit posts on observability, found out that the official claude CLI actually exposes telemetry. Of course, I had to hook it up to my local SigNoz instance to see what it produces and visualize it.

Setup

To get this done it’s pretty straightforward, enable or set some variables per session or in your favorite shell and done!. - see actual steps here My variable setup looks like this.

export CLAUDE_CODE_ENABLE_TELEMETRY=1
export OTEL_METRICS_EXPORTER=otlp
export OTEL_LOGS_EXPORTER=otlp
export OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_PROTOCOL=http/json
export OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT=http://otel.local.net

Do want to point out I already run an OTEL collector in a centralized location to receive all of the metrics/logs/traces from my various services/applications. If you want to setup yours, this is a nice guide on what it is, how it works and how to get it running.

Results

After looking at the metrics and logs it produced I came up with a simple dashboard that shows me the core results of my experience with the tool:

  • Cost
  • Token usage
  • Model usage
  • Input and Output Tokens
  • Average request duration

dashboard

Next steps:

  • Setup an alert when the Cost is getting close to a limit.
  • Review how efficient my prompts are using the length and token usage.
  • Track which model gives me better results for the type of task I’m working with, now that i can have a breakdown of it’s usage
  • Improve prompts to have a higher control on the number of output tokens

Quick one for this week, hope you enjoyed it! Adios! 👋

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