feat(examples): migrate AI examples to OpenTelemetry instrumentation

[richardsolomou]

Problem

Our AI examples use PostHog's direct SDK wrappers (posthog.ai.openai, posthog.ai.anthropic, etc.) for tracking LLM calls. We want to silently deprecate these in favor of standard OpenTelemetry instrumentation, which is more portable and follows industry conventions.

Changes

Migrates 28 Python AI examples from PostHog direct wrappers to OpenTelemetry auto-instrumentation:

• 15 OpenAI-compatible providers (Groq, DeepSeek, Mistral, xAI, Together AI, Ollama, Cohere, Hugging Face, Perplexity, Cerebras, Fireworks AI, OpenRouter, Helicone, Vercel AI Gateway, Portkey) → opentelemetry-instrumentation-openai-v2
• OpenAI (all 6 files), Azure OpenAI, Instructor, Mirascope, Smolagents, AutoGen, Semantic Kernel → opentelemetry-instrumentation-openai-v2
• Anthropic (chat, streaming, extended thinking) → opentelemetry-instrumentation-anthropic
• Gemini (chat, streaming, image generation) → opentelemetry-instrumentation-google-generativeai
• LangChain, LangGraph → opentelemetry-instrumentation-langchain
• LlamaIndex → opentelemetry-instrumentation-llamaindex

Kept as-is: CrewAI (manages its own TracerProvider, uses LiteLLM callbacks), AWS Bedrock/Pydantic AI (already OTel), LiteLLM/DSPy (LiteLLM callbacks), OpenAI Agents/Claude Agent SDK (native PostHog integration).

Key implementation details:

• Uses SimpleSpanProcessor instead of BatchSpanProcessor so spans export immediately without needing provider.shutdown()
• Imports after Instrumentor().instrument() are marked with # noqa: E402
• Provider SDK imports are intentionally placed after instrumentation setup

[github-actions]

posthog-python Compliance Report

Date: 2026-04-08 10:06:46 UTC
Duration: 197ms

✅ All Tests Passed!

0/0 tests passed

---

[socket-security]

Review the following changes in direct dependencies. Learn more about Socket for GitHub.

Diff	Package	Supply Chain Security	Vulnerability	Quality	Maintenance	License
	anthropic@​0.87.0
	opentelemetry-sdk@​1.39.1
	opentelemetry-sdk@​1.40.0
	requests@​2.33.1
	opentelemetry-exporter-otlp-proto-http@​1.39.1
	opentelemetry-exporter-otlp-proto-http@​1.40.0
	opentelemetry-exporter-otlp-proto-http@​1.34.1
	opentelemetry-sdk@​1.34.1
	opentelemetry-instrumentation-anthropic@​0.57.0

View full report

[greptile-apps]

Vulnerabilities

No security concerns identified. API keys are sourced exclusively from environment variables (os.environ[...]) and are not hardcoded. The OTLP exporter sends keys in an HTTP Authorization header over HTTPS to the PostHog endpoint, which is the expected pattern.

Prompt To Fix All With AI

This is a comment left during a code review.
Path: examples/example-ai-azure-openai/chat.py
Line: 28

Comment:
**Unrecognized Azure model name**

`grok-4-20-non-reasoning` does not correspond to any model ID in Azure AI Foundry's catalog. The available xAI Grok names there are `grok-4`, `grok-4-fast-non-reasoning`, `grok-4-fast-reasoning`, `grok-4.1-fast-non-reasoning`, etc. This looks like a typo or an accidental change — using this value in an example will mislead anyone who tries to replicate it and will fail against any standard deployment. This change also appears unrelated to the OTel migration that is the purpose of this PR.

```suggestion
    model="gpt-4o",
```

How can I resolve this? If you propose a fix, please make it concise.

---

This is a comment left during a code review.
Path: examples/example-ai-openai/transcription.py
Line: 31-34

Comment:
**Inconsistent `provider.shutdown()` on early exit path**

This `provider.shutdown()` before `sys.exit(0)` is the only remaining shutdown call across all 28 migrated examples. The PR description explicitly states that `SimpleSpanProcessor` is used so spans export immediately without needing `provider.shutdown()`. Remove it for consistency.

```suggestion
if not os.path.exists(audio_path):
    print(f"Skipping: audio file not found at '{audio_path}'")
    print("Set AUDIO_PATH to a valid audio file (mp3, wav, m4a, etc.)")
    sys.exit(0)
```

How can I resolve this? If you propose a fix, please make it concise.

_{Reviews (1): Last reviewed commit: "style(examples): add noqa: E402 for inte..." | Re-trigger Greptile}

[andrewm4894]

does the otel example show this?

[andrewm4894]

i think the otel examples should be as full featured as possible and show stuff like setting distinct id and any custom foo-bar properties - am i missing that or something?