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This guide covers advanced topics related to self-hosting.

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Enable or disable telemetry

Braintrust can send the following types of telemetry from your self-hosted data plane to Braintrust’s control plane:
TypeDescription
statusHealth check information (enabled by default)
metricsSystem metrics (CPU/memory) and Braintrust-specific metrics like indexing lag (enabled by default)
usageBilling usage telemetry for aggregate usage metrics (enabled by default)
memprofMemory profiling statistics and heap usage patterns
logsApplication logs
tracesDistributed tracing data
By default, status, metrics, and usage are enabled. You can change the defaults as follows:
Add the monitoring_telemetry variable to your variables.tf file, and include the types of telemetry you want to send in the validation condition as a comma-separated list:
variable "monitoring_telemetry" {
  description = <<-EOT
    The telemetry to send to Braintrust's control plane to monitor your deployment. Should be in the form of comma-separated values.

    Available options:
    - status: Health check information (default)
    - metrics: System metrics (CPU/memory) and Braintrust-specific metrics like indexing lag (default)
    - usage: Billing usage telemetry for aggregate usage metrics
    - memprof: Memory profiling statistics and heap usage patterns
    - logs: Application logs
    - traces: Distributed tracing data
  EOT
  type        = string
  default     = "status,metrics,usage"

  validation {
    condition = var.monitoring_telemetry == "" || alltrue([
      for item in split(",", var.monitoring_telemetry) :
      contains(["metrics", "logs", "traces", "status", "memprof", "usage"], trimspace(item))
    ])
    error_message = "The monitoring_telemetry value must be a comma-separated list containing only: metrics, logs, traces, status, memprof, usage."
  }
}
Braintrust also has access to endpoints reporting metrics about the backfill and compaction status of Brainstore segments. This is metadata only, no customer data. To disable these endpoints, set the DISABLE_SYSADMIN_TELEMETRY environment variable to true.

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Secure sensitive customer data

Braintrust’s servers and employees do not require access to your data plane for it to operate successfully. That means that you can protect it behind a firewall/VPN and physically isolate it from access. When you use the Braintrust web application, it communicates directly with the data plane (via CORS), and the data does not flow through any intermediate systems (the control plane, or otherwise) before reaching your browser. While the data plane does send metrics and status telemetry to the control plane, it does not send logs, traces, or customer data. Because of this architecture, our self-hosted customers do not generally list us as a subprocessor. Like any third-party software, it is important that you establish the appropriate controls to ensure that your deployment is secure, and we’re very happy to help you do so. Ultimately, the goal of the control plane and data plane split is to provide you with the highest levels of security and compliance.

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Customize the webapp URL

The SDKs guide users to https://www.braintrust.dev (or the BRAINTRUST_APP_URL variable) to view their experiments. However, in certain advanced configurations, you may want to reverse proxy traffic to the BRAINTRUST_APP_URL from the SDKs while pointing users to a different URL. To do this, you can set the BRAINTRUST_APP_PUBLIC_URL environment variable to the URL of your webapp. By default, this variable is set to the value of BRAINTRUST_APP_URL, but you can customize it as you wish. This variable is only used to display information, so even its destination does not need to be accessible from the SDK.

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Constrain SDKs to the data plane

If you’re self-hosting the data plane, it may also be advantageous to constrain the SDKs to only communicate with your data plane. Normally, they communicate with the control plane to:
  • Get your data plane’s URL
  • Register and retrieve metadata (e.g. about experiments)
  • Print URLs to the webapp
The data plane can proxy the endpoints that the SDKs use to communicate with the control plane, allowing your SDKs to only communicate with the data plane directly. Set the BRAINTRUST_APP_URL environment variable to the URL of your data plane and BRAINTRUST_APP_PUBLIC_URL to “https://www.braintrust.dev” (or the URL of your webapp).

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Restrict URLs

In some cases, you may want to restrict the URLs that the SDKs or API server can communicate with. If so, you should include the following URLs: 
www.braintrust.dev
braintrust.dev

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Configure rate limits

By default, the Braintrust API server imposes rate limits against any external domains it reaches out to, such as the BRAINTRUST_APP_URL. The purpose of rate-limiting is to prevent unintentionally overloading any external domains, which may block the API server IP in response. By default, the rate limit is 100 requests per minute per user auth token. The API server exposes the following variables to configure the rate limits:
  • OUTBOUND_RATE_LIMIT_MAX_REQUESTS: Configure the number of requests per time window. This can be set to 0 to disable rate limiting.
  • OUTBOUND_RATE_LIMIT_WINDOW_MINUTES: Configure the time window in minutes before the rate limit resets.

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Enable audit headers

When integrating with Braintrust, especially in environments where actions need to be attributed to specific users or for compliance purposes, you might want to enable audit headers. These headers provide additional metadata about the request and the resources it touched. To enable audit headers, include the x-bt-enable-audit: true header in your API request. When this header is present, the API response will include the following additional headers:
  • x-bt-audit-user-id: The ID of the user who made the request (based on the provided API key or impersonation).
  • x-bt-audit-user-email: The email of the user who made the request.
  • x-bt-audit-normalized-url: A normalized representation of the API endpoint path that was called. Path parameters like object IDs are replaced with placeholders (for example, /v1/project/[id]).
  • x-bt-audit-resources: A JSON-encoded, gzipped, and base64-encoded string containing a list of Braintrust resources (like projects, experiments, datasets, etc.) that were accessed or modified by the request. Each resource object includes its type, id, and name.
The x-bt-audit-resources header requires specific parsing due to its encoding. Here’s an example of how to parse it using the Python SDK: 
import os

import braintrust
import requests

API_URL = "https://api.braintrust.dev/v1"
# Ensure BRAINTRUST_API_KEY is set in your environment.
headers = {
    "Authorization": "Bearer " + os.environ["BRAINTRUST_API_KEY"],
    "x-bt-enable-audit": "true",  # Enable audit headers
}

# Example: Create a project.
response = requests.post(f"{API_URL}/project", headers=headers, json={"name": "audit-test-project"})
response.raise_for_status()

project_data = response.json()
print(f"Project created: {project_data['name']} (ID: {project_data['id']})")

# Access and parse audit headers.
user_id = response.headers.get("x-bt-audit-user-id")
user_email = response.headers.get("x-bt-audit-user-email")
normalized_url = response.headers.get("x-bt-audit-normalized-url")
resources_header = response.headers.get("x-bt-audit-resources")

print(f"Audit User ID: {user_id}")
print(f"Audit User Email: {user_email}")
print(f"Normalized URL: {normalized_url}")

if resources_header:
    try:
        # Use the provided utility to parse the resources header.
        resources = braintrust.parse_audit_resources(resources_header)
        print("Accessed/Modified Resources:")
        for resource in resources:
            print(f"  - Type: {resource['type']}, ID: {resource['id']}, Name: {resource['name']}")
    except Exception as e:
        print(f"Error parsing resources header: {e}")
else:
    print("No resources header found.")
This feature is useful for building audit logs or understanding resource usage patterns within your applications that interact with the Braintrust API.

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Control data retention

For features like data retention, the data plane needs a service token with read-only permissions on projects to query object metadata and look up rentention policies configured in your organization. Braintrust provides a simple way to automatically create a service token with these permissions and then store it in the data plane for you. Navigate to Settings > Service tokens to create or verify the status of the data plane service token. You can Create or Refresh the service token at any time and the data plane will automatically start using it. Data plane manager