Practical overview
When it fits
Use Langfuse when you need a shared engineering workspace to follow LLM application behavior through traces and connect that observability to prompt iteration and evaluation.
Who it is for
- Developers instrumenting Python LLM applications.
- AI application teams investigating model calls, retrieval, embeddings, or agent actions.
- Teams managing prompts, evaluation datasets, and feedback workflows.
Documented uses
- Trace model calls and related application logic.
- Inspect logs and user sessions to debug complex LLM workflows.
- Manage and collaboratively iterate on versioned prompts.
- Evaluate applications with judges, code evaluators, feedback, manual labels, or custom pipelines.
- Use datasets for benchmarks, experiments, and pre-deployment testing.
Requirements & limits
The project documents Langfuse Cloud and self-hosted deployment. Its quickstart requires creating an account or self-hosting, then creating a project and API credentials for the trace-ingestion workflow.
- Connecting an application requires instrumentation; the documented Python quickstart uses the Langfuse SDK and OpenAI integration.
- Evaluation options include LLM-as-a-judge, code evaluators, user feedback, manual labeling, and custom pipelines.
- Datasets support benchmarks, experiments, and pre-deployment testing.
- Self-hosting is available alongside the hosted Cloud option.
- The README identifies the project as open source and displays an MIT license badge.
Check current requirements in the official documentation. Source-based guidance does not mean OpenViST has run or independently tested this project.
Trace a Python OpenAI call with Langfuse
Set up a Langfuse project and instrument a Python OpenAI call so its trace can be viewed in Langfuse.
Before you start
- A Langfuse account or a self-hosted Langfuse instance.
- Python application using the OpenAI integration.
- A new Langfuse project and API credentials created in its project settings.
Steps
Create a Langfuse account or self-host Langfuse, then create a project and generate API credentials in its settings.
Install the Python packages with the command below.
pip install langfuse openaiSet
LANGFUSE_SECRET_KEYandLANGFUSE_PUBLIC_KEYin a.envfile, and setLANGFUSE_BASE_URLto the appropriate Langfuse Cloud region URL shown in the quickstart.Use
@observe()on Python functions and call the OpenAI integration throughfrom langfuse.openai import openai; run the application code.View the resulting language-model calls and application logic as traces in Langfuse.
Expected outcome
The instrumented OpenAI call and observed application functions are logged as traces that can be inspected in Langfuse.
Guide limitations
- The shown code path is for Python and the Langfuse OpenAI integration; other models and frameworks use other documented integrations.
- The quickstart shows Langfuse Cloud region URLs; it does not specify the base URL for a self-hosted installation.
Sources & review
Source record details
- Source availability
- Active
- Sources checked
- 14 October 2026
- Original website title
- langfuse/langfuse · Official homepage title · retained in its source language

