Sessions and Users

Adding SessionID and UserID as attributes to Spans for Tracing

What are Sessions?

A session is a grouping of traces based on a session ID attribute. When building or debugging a chatbot application, being able to see groups of messages or traces belonging to a series of interactions between a human and the AI can be particularly helpful. By adding session.id and user.id as attributes to spans, you can:

  • Find exactly where a conversation "breaks" or goes off the rails. This can help identify if a user becomes progressively more frustrated or if a chatbot is not helpful.

  • Find groups of traces where your application is not performing well. Adding session.id and/or user.id from an application enables back-and-forth interactions to be grouped and filtered further.

  • Construct custom metrics based on evals using session.id or user.id to find best/worst performing sessions and users.

Adding SessionID and UserID

Session and user IDs can be added to a span using auto instrumentation or manual instrumentation of Open Inference. Any LLM call within the context (the with block in the example below) will contain corresponding session.id or user.id as a span attribute. session.id and user.id must be a non-empty string.

When defining your instrumentation, you can pass the sessionID attribute as shown below.

Requires pip install openinference-instrumentation-openai

Once you define your OpenAI client, any call inside our context managers will attach the corresponding attributes to the spans.

import openai
from openinference.instrumentation import using_attributes

client = openai.OpenAI()

# Defining a Session
with using_attributes(session_id="my-session-id"):
    response = client.chat.completions.create(
        model="gpt-3.5-turbo",
        messages=[{"role": "user", "content": "Write a haiku."}],
        max_tokens=20,
    )

# Defining a User
with using_attributes(user_id="my-user-id"):
    response = client.chat.completions.create(
        model="gpt-3.5-turbo",
        messages=[{"role": "user", "content": "Write a haiku."}],
        max_tokens=20,
    )
    
# Defining a Session AND a User
with using_attributes(
    session_id="my-session-id",
    user_id="my-user-id",
):
    response = client.chat.completions.create(
        model="gpt-3.5-turbo",
        messages=[{"role": "user", "content": "Write a haiku."}],
        max_tokens=20,
    )

Alternatively, if you wrap your calls inside functions, you can use them as decorators:

from openinference.instrumentation import using_attributes

client = openai.OpenAI()

# Defining a Session
@using_attributes(session_id="my-session-id")
def call_fn(client, *args, **kwargs):
    return client.chat.completions.create(*args, **kwargs)
    
# Defining a User
@using_attributes(user_id="my-user-id")
def call_fn(client, *args, **kwargs):
    return client.chat.completions.create(*args, **kwargs)

# Defining a Session AND a User
@using_attributes(
    session_id="my-session-id",
    user_id="my-user-id",
)
def call_fn(client, *args, **kwargs):
    return client.chat.completions.create(*args, **kwargs)

To access an applications sessions in the platform, select "Sessions" from the left nav.

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