Cerebrium

Send resource, GPU, and execution metrics from your Cerebrium serverless GPU applications to Last9. Cerebrium pushes metrics natively over OTLP/HTTP every 60 seconds — no SDK code, no sidecar, just dashboard configuration.

What is Cerebrium?

Cerebrium is a serverless GPU infrastructure platform for real-time AI workloads. It autoscales containers in 1–3 seconds and bills per second of compute. Cerebrium has built-in OpenTelemetry metric export to any OTLP/HTTP backend.

Prerequisites

1. Last9 Account — Sign up at app.last9.io
2. Cerebrium Account — With at least one deployed application

Integration Setup

1. Get Your Last9 OTLP Endpoint and Auth Header

   Navigate to Integrations → OpenTelemetry in your Last9 dashboard. Copy the OTLP Endpoint (the base URL — for example, https://otlp-aps1.last9.io) and the Auth Header value (a string starting with Basic).

2. Open Cerebrium’s Metrics Export Settings

   In the Cerebrium dashboard, go to Integrations → Metrics Export, then select Custom OTLP.

3. Configure the Endpoint and Auth Header

   Enter the following values:

   Field	Value
   OTLP Endpoint	https://otlp-aps1.last9.io (base URL — see note below)
   Auth Header Name	Authorization
   Auth Header Value	Basic <token> (paste the full Auth Header from Last9, including the Basic prefix with a literal space)

4. Test the Connection

   Click Test Connection in the Cerebrium dashboard. Once it passes, metrics begin flowing within ~60 seconds.

What Gets Exported

Cerebrium emits the following metrics every 60 seconds, labelled with project_id, app_id, app_name, and region.

Resource Metrics

Execution Metrics

Viewing Metrics in Last9

Open Metrics Explorer and filter by app_name or project_id. Useful starter queries:

# GPU utilization per app
avg by (app_name) (cerebrium_gpu_compute_utilization_percent)

# p95 execution latency
histogram_quantile(0.95, sum by (le, app_name) (rate(cerebrium_run_execution_time_ms_milliseconds_bucket[5m])))

# Error rate per app
sum by (app_name) (rate(cerebrium_run_errors_total[5m]))
  / sum by (app_name) (rate(cerebrium_run_total[5m]))

# Running container count
sum by (app_name) (cerebrium_containers_running_count)

Sending Traces

Cerebrium’s platform-side OTLP push covers metrics only. To get application traces (per-request spans, downstream HTTP calls, LLM provider latency) into Last9, run opentelemetry-instrument in your Cerebrium entrypoint — no code changes required in your application.

1. Add the OTel packages to [cerebrium.dependencies.pip] in your cerebrium.toml.

   [cerebrium.dependencies.pip]
   opentelemetry-distro = ">=0.51b0"
   opentelemetry-exporter-otlp = ">=1.30.0"
   opentelemetry-semantic-conventions = ">=0.51b0"

   Pin all three together. Without consistent versions, the newer exporter imports semconv._incubating against an older semantic-conventions wheel and startup fails with ModuleNotFoundError.

2. Install instrumentors during build via shell_commands.

   [cerebrium.deployment]
   shell_commands = ["opentelemetry-bootstrap --action=install"]

   This detects every supported library in your pip deps (FastAPI, requests, httpx, OpenAI, Anthropic, SQLAlchemy, etc.) and installs the matching opentelemetry-instrumentation-* packages.

3. Wrap your entrypoint with opentelemetry-instrument.

   [cerebrium.runtime.custom]
   port = 8000
   entrypoint = [
     "opentelemetry-instrument",
     "uvicorn", "main:app",
     "--host", "0.0.0.0", "--port", "8000",
   ]

4. Set OTel env vars as Cerebrium secrets.

   cerebrium secrets add OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT=https://otlp-aps1.last9.io
   cerebrium secrets add OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_PROTOCOL=http/protobuf
   cerebrium secrets add OTEL_SERVICE_NAME=my-cerebrium-app
   cerebrium secrets add 'OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_HEADERS=Authorization=Basic <your-token>'

   Note the inner = in OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_HEADERS — that is the OTel env-var convention for <header-name>=<header-value>, not a typo.

5. Deploy. Traces appear in Traces Explorer within seconds, filtered by service.name.

A runnable, verified example is available at last9/opentelemetry-examples — python/cerebrium/.

Troubleshooting

• 401 / 403 Unauthorized — The Auth Header value is malformed. Use a literal space between Basic and the token (not %20, not =). Confirm Name is Authorization and Value starts with Basic .
• 404 Endpoint not found — The endpoint URL has /v1/metrics appended. Remove it; Cerebrium appends it automatically.
• Unknown export error — Often produced when the endpoint resolves but the path does not match Last9’s /v1/metrics route. Confirm you are using the base URL from your Last9 OpenTelemetry integration page and that no extra suffix or trailing slash is present.
• No metrics arriving after Test Connection passes — Metrics push every 60 seconds. Wait ~2 minutes, then filter by app_name in Metrics Explorer.
• ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'opentelemetry.semconv._incubating' at container startup — Version skew between opentelemetry-exporter-otlp-proto-common and opentelemetry-semantic-conventions. Pin all three OTel packages together as shown in step 1 above.
• Failed to auto initialize opentelemetry in container logs — Auto-instrumentation crashed at sitecustomize. Check Cerebrium build logs for the opentelemetry-bootstrap output and confirm instrumentors installed cleanly.
• App starts and serves traffic, but no traces in Last9 — Either the OTel env-var secrets are unset on this app, or the auth header is malformed. Verify with cerebrium secrets list that all four OTEL_* secrets are present, and that OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_HEADERS uses the Authorization=Basic <token> form (not just the token).

Please get in touch with us on Discord or Email if you have any questions.