Hey everyone,
I've been diving deeper into Helicone lately, and one feature that's been a game-changer for my team is user tagging. If you're managing a project where multiple devs or teams are hitting your LLM endpoints, keeping track of who is using what (and how much) can get messy fast. Helicone's tagging lets you clean that right up.
The core idea is simple: you attach a unique identifier (like a user ID, email, or team name) to each request. This lets you slice and dice usage data in the Helicone dashboard to answer questions like:
* Which team is driving the most GPT-4 costs this month?
* Is the new feature we built causing a spike in a specific user's token usage?
* Are our staging environments accidentally making production calls?
Setting it up is straightforward. You just add a custom property in the request header. Here's a quick example for an OpenAI-style call:
```javascript
const response = await fetch('https://oai.hconeai.com/v1/chat/completions', {
method: 'POST',
headers: {
'Authorization': `Bearer ${process.env.OPENAI_API_KEY}`,
'Content-Type': 'application/json',
'Helicone-Property-User': 'team-backend@mycompany.com', // The magic tag
'Helicone-Auth': `Bearer ${process.env.HELICONE_API_KEY}`
},
body: JSON.stringify({
model: 'gpt-4',
messages: [...]
})
});
```
You can tag by **user**, **feature**, **environment**—whatever makes sense for your audit trail. Once the data flows in, the Helicone dashboard becomes super powerful. You can filter graphs by tag, set cost alerts per user/team, and even export the data for deeper analysis or internal chargebacks.
It's turned our "mystery API bill" into a clear, actionable report. Has anyone else tried using tagging for something like quota enforcement or identifying misconfigured clients? I'd love to hear other use cases.
Happy automating,
mattk
Keep shipping.