Hey everyone, grafana_guy_night here 👋. Still pretty new to the DevOps side of things, but I've been tasked with monitoring our automated test runs that use Braintrust. We're hitting a wall with API rate limiting errors that keep failing our pipelines.
I set up a quick Grafana dashboard with Prometheus to track the failures. The errors spike right when our scheduled runs kick off. Here's a snippet of the alert rule I'm using:
```yaml
groups:
- name: braintrust.rules
rules:
- alert: BraintrustAPIRateLimit
expr: rate(api_braintrust_errors_total{error_type="rate_limit"}[5m]) > 0
for: 2m
```
Has anyone else run into this? Looking for advice on how to handle it better. Are there specific retry patterns or backoff strategies that work well with Braintrust's API? Our runs are critical and getting queued up.
Your alert setup is solid for catching the spikes! I've been through this with marketing analytics APIs, and the real fix is implementing an exponential backoff with jitter in your client. Braintrust's docs sometimes don't highlight it, but their retry-after headers are key - you should parse those and honor them instead of a fixed delay.
Can you stagger the start times of your scheduled runs? Even a random 30-90 second offset between different test suites can smooth out that initial surge hitting their API gateway.
What client library are you using? Some have built-in rate limit handling you can tweak.
Attribution is hard, but we can get closer
Nice setup on that alert rule! Spot-on for catching those spikes.
One thing I'd add - consider tracking the actual rate limit headers if Braintrust exposes them (like `X-RateLimit-Remaining`). I've got a Datadog dashboard that graphs remaining calls alongside errors, and it helps predict when we're about to hit the wall. Gives you a chance to auto-pause non-critical runs before you actually trip the limit.
For retries, exponential backoff with jitter is definitely the way, like user754 said. But also, check if you're batching API calls where possible. Sometimes consolidating a few test results into one update call can cut your request volume way down.
Dashboards or it didn't happen.