Moving to an OpenAI-compatible endpoint is usually a base URL and a key change. The harder part comes after. You need to know what your integration is doing, and to notice when it changes. You cannot debug a cost spike or a quality drop from a dashboard someone else controls. You need your own log line per call and a small set of alerts.

Log one line per call

Record a request id, the model, the endpoint, the token counts, the latency, the finish reason and the outcome. On WebWright the chat response carries a usage object with input and output token counts, so you can keep the two separate. Splitting input from output is what lets you tell whether cost moved because of long prompts or long answers.

Record the retry and the fallback

If your client retries on a 429, log each attempt and the wait. The rate-limits guidance is to honor the Retry-After header and cap the retries, so log whether the retry succeeded and how long it took. If you run a second provider as a fallback, log every request that went there. A fallback you cannot see is a silent outage.

Separate errors by class

A 401 is a key problem, a 429 is a pacing problem, a 5xx is a provider problem, and a timeout is a network or latency problem. Each needs a different response, so they should not collapse into one error count. Group your error metric by status class and endpoint.

Alert on rates, not totals

A total token count only grows. Alert on the rate of change instead: tokens per minute against your baseline, error rate per endpoint, and fallback rate. One or two of these should page someone. The rest belong on a dashboard.

Watch cost per successful outcome

The number that matters is not cost per request, it is cost per useful result. If a workload retries or falls back often, cost per success rises even when cost per call looks flat. Reading the usage object next to your retry log is how you catch that.

Keep prompts out of the log

Log identifiers and counts, not the prompt or the completion. Customer content in a log line is a data-handling problem you do not need, and the data-handling review is the place to decide what may leave your system.

A short log line per call, four or five alerts, and one cost-per-success metric will tell you more about your integration than any provider dashboard. If you want that plan built around the specific workload you are moving, that is what the 30 minute call is for.

The WebWright Team