How can I monitor API usage on OpenAI?

To monitor API usage on OpenAI, you can use the OpenAI platform’s built-in tools and programmatic methods. The primary approach is through the OpenAI Dashboard, which provides a visual overview of your API activity. After logging into your account, the dashboard displays metrics like total requests, tokens consumed, and costs per API key or project. You can filter data by date range, API key, or model type (e.g., GPT-4, DALL-E). For example, if you’re testing a new feature, you might track daily token usage to avoid exceeding budget limits. The dashboard also lets you set soft limits (email alerts) and hard limits (automatic shutdown) for spending, which is useful for team projects or cost-sensitive applications.

For more granular control, use the OpenAI API itself to programmatically retrieve usage data. The API offers endpoints like https://api.openai.com/v1/usage (for organization-level data) or https://api.openai.com/v1/dashboard/billing/usage (for individual projects). You can fetch data for specific date ranges, such as checking last month’s token consumption. For instance, a developer might write a script that runs daily to pull usage metrics and log them to a database. This method is ideal for integrating usage tracking into existing monitoring systems. Note that API responses include fields like total_tokens and total_requests, which you can map to your internal metrics or alerting tools. Authentication requires your API key and, for organizational accounts, an optional organization ID header.

Lastly, consider third-party tools or custom logging. Services like Grafana, Datadog, or custom Python scripts can ingest OpenAI API logs for advanced analytics. For example, you could log each API call’s timestamp, model, tokens used, and response status to a cloud storage service like AWS S3. This lets you build dashboards to monitor trends, such as spikes in error rates or unexpected usage patterns. If you’re building a multi-tenant app, adding metadata like user IDs to API requests helps track per-customer usage. For real-time alerts, set up webhooks that notify your team when usage exceeds thresholds. Combining these methods ensures comprehensive monitoring, whether you’re optimizing costs, debugging, or enforcing rate limits.