Getting started with Tracing

Note: Tracing is in alpha. Setup details, including the ingestion endpoint, may change before general availability.

Install an OpenTelemetry trace exporter

PostHog Tracing works with any OpenTelemetry client. No PostHog-specific packages are required. Use the OTel SDKs you already have, point your trace exporter at PostHog's HTTP endpoint, and add your project token.

Set these on your OpenTelemetry SDK:

Terminal
OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_TRACES_ENDPOINT="https://us.i.posthog.com/i/v1/traces"
OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_TRACES_HEADERS="Authorization=Bearer <ph_project_token>"
OTEL_SERVICE_NAME="my-app"

<ph_client_api_host> and <ph_project_token> are filled in with your project's values when you're logged in. Use your project token (the same one you use for capturing events), not a personal API key.

This is a different endpoint from PostHog's AI/LLM tracing (/i/v0/ai/otel), which only accepts generative-AI spans. For general application traces, use /i/v1/traces.

Send context-rich spans

PostHog ingests spans using OpenTelemetry's standard model: a trace is a tree of spans, each with a trace_id, span_id, and parent_span_id, plus timing, a service name, and attributes.

Wrap the operations you care about – incoming requests, outgoing calls, database queries – in spans, and enrich them with attributes for business context.

Python
from opentelemetry import trace

tracer = trace.get_tracer("my-app")

with tracer.start_as_current_span("checkout") as span:
    span.set_attribute("user.id", "123")
    span.set_attribute("cart.value", 4200)
    # ... your code ...

Explore your traces

Once spans are flowing into PostHog, you can:

Search and filter spans by service, status, duration, and attributes
Follow a trace end to end as a waterfall to see where time goes
Spot slow and failing operations across your services

Part of PostHog's observability suite

Tracing uses the same OpenTelemetry-based ingestion as Logs, so a single OTel setup covers both. Your traces also live in the same PostHog project as Session Replay, Error Tracking, and Product Analytics – one platform instead of another observability vendor to run.