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Telemetry

Pipelex supports two independent telemetry streams that serve different purposes. Understanding how they work helps you make informed decisions about data collection.

Two Telemetry Streams

1. Gateway Telemetry (Pipelex-Controlled)

When you use Pipelex Gateway as your inference backend, identified telemetry is automatically enabled. This telemetry is tied to your Gateway API key (hashed for security) and operates independently from your telemetry.toml settings.

What we collect:

  • Model names used (e.g., gpt-5.2, claude-4.5-sonnet) and parameters
  • Pipe types (e.g., PipeLLM, PipeSequence, etc.)
  • Token counts (input/output)
  • Latency metrics
  • Error rates (without error details)

What we do NOT collect:

  • Your prompts or completions
  • Your pipe codes or output class names
  • File contents or business data

This telemetry allows us to:

  • Monitor and improve service quality
  • Enforce fair usage limits and prevent abuse
  • Provide you with usage insights and better support

Gateway Telemetry is Optional

Using Pipelex Gateway is entirely optional. If you prefer not to send telemetry to Pipelex servers, simply use your own API keys with direct provider backends (OpenAI, Anthropic, Azure, Bedrock, etc.).

2. Custom Telemetry (User-Controlled)

Custom telemetry is configured in .pipelex/telemetry.toml and allows you to send observability data to your own analytics and monitoring systems:

  • PostHog: Event tracking and AI span tracing with privacy controls
  • Langfuse: Full LLM observability (receives full span data)
  • OTLP: Send spans to any OpenTelemetry-compatible backend (receives full span data)

Custom telemetry is completely independent from Gateway telemetry—you can use both, either, or neither.

Quick Setup

When you run pipelex init, a default telemetry.toml configuration file is created:

pipelex init telemetry

This creates .pipelex/telemetry.toml with all options disabled by default. Edit this file to enable your preferred telemetry destinations.

Example: Enable PostHog Tracing

[custom_posthog]
mode = "anonymous"  # or "identified" with user_id
endpoint = "${POSTHOG_ENDPOINT}"
api_key = "${POSTHOG_API_KEY}"

[custom_posthog.tracing]
enabled = true

[custom_posthog.tracing.capture]
content = false        # Don't capture prompts/completions
pipe_codes = true      # Include pipe codes in span names

Example: Enable Langfuse

[langfuse]
enabled = true
public_key = "${LANGFUSE_PUBLIC_KEY}"
secret_key = "${LANGFUSE_SECRET_KEY}"

DO_NOT_TRACK Global Override

The DO_NOT_TRACK environment variable provides a universal way to disable all telemetry:

export DO_NOT_TRACK=1

When set, this disables:

  • Gateway telemetry (but note: Gateway won't work without telemetry)
  • All custom telemetry destinations

Gateway Requires Telemetry

If you set DO_NOT_TRACK=1 while using Pipelex Gateway, the Gateway will not function. Use direct provider backends instead if you need to disable all telemetry.

Privacy

We take your privacy seriously:

  • Gateway telemetry never collects prompts, completions, or business data
  • Custom telemetry gives you full control over what data is captured
  • PostHog tracing includes privacy controls to redact sensitive content
  • All telemetry can be completely disabled

For detailed configuration options, see Telemetry Configuration.

For more information about our data practices, see our Privacy Policy.