Braintrust vs Grafana for LLM observability: Logging vs evals

Grafana and Braintrust are two platforms that together provide a comprehensive observability and evaluation framework for large language model (LLM) applications. Grafana is the industry standard for monitoring the health of LLM infrastructure, offering visibility into metrics such as latency, error rates, token usage, and GPU utilization, while also conducting basic safety evaluations through OpenLIT. Braintrust complements Grafana by filling the evaluation gap, offering tools to score output quality, manage prompt versions, run regression tests, and enforce CI/CD quality gates. It can identify issues like prompt regressions quickly and links production traces to scoring workflows, making it the stronger choice for ensuring that LLM outputs meet business and policy standards. Through OpenTelemetry, the two platforms can be integrated to provide a full-stack monitoring and evaluation system, with Grafana focusing on infrastructure health and Braintrust ensuring model output quality. Companies like Notion and Stripe use Braintrust to improve their LLM evaluation and observability capabilities, benefiting from features such as custom scoring functions, exhaustive trace logging, and prompt version management.

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