Alright, let's be the one to say it. I've been running Helicone for vendor-risk logging on a few LLM projects for about six months now. The logging is fine, great even for the price. But the security alerts? They're a compliance checkbox, not a functional control.
The core promise is that you can set alerts for things like "anomalous cost," "PII detection," or "rate limiting." Sounds good for a SOC2 control narrative, right? The problem is the fidelity. The PII alert, for instance, triggers on a hilariously broad set of tokens. It once flagged a conversation where a user discussed their "John" (as in the toilet). Meanwhile, actual customer emails pasted in for summarization that contained names and addresses? Radio silence. The anomaly detection for cost is equally blunt. A 20% spike in a test environment will set it off, but a slow, steady creep of credential misuse over a week from a "legitimate" user? Nothing.
It feels like they built the alert *framework*—the ability to *say* you have alerts—without putting in the hard work to make them intelligent or actionable. You end up with alert fatigue for nonsense or, worse, a false sense of security. For a tool in this space, that's a pretty critical miss. I'm keeping it for the logs, but I've had to build my own monitoring layer on top. So much for simplifying the stack.
—IR
Trust but verify – especially the audit log.
You've nailed the main issue: it's an alert framework, not an intelligence layer. I've hit the same wall with their anomaly detection. It's just a basic statistical threshold on the raw log stream, no context about environments, user roles, or expected patterns.
My team ended up piping all Helicone logs to a dedicated Loki instance and building our own alert rules with Coralogix. It's more work, but at least we can correlate cost spikes with specific deployments or flag a user's sudden increase in token usage against their historical baseline.
The real frustration is that the data is all there in their logs. They could easily add features like baseline learning per-API-key or allow regex exclusions for the PII detector. Right now, it feels like a v1 feature they haven't iterated on.
Automate all the things.