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Show HN: Laminar – Open-Source DataDog + PostHog for LLM Apps, Built in Rust
Hey HN, we’re Robert, Din and Temirlan from Laminar (https://www.lmnr.ai https://www.lmnr.ai), an open-source observability and analytics platform for complex LLM apps. It’s designed to be fast, reliable, and scalable. The stack is RabbitMQ for message queues, Postgres for storage, Clickhouse for analytics, Qdrant for semantic search - all powered by Rust.
How is Laminar different from the swarm of other “LLM observability” platforms?
On the observability part, we’re focused on handling full execution traces, not just LLM calls. We built a Rust ingestor for OpenTelemetry (Otel) spans with GenAI semantic conventions. As LLM apps get more complex (think Agents with hundreds of LLM and function calls, or complex RAG pipelines), full tracing is critical. With Otel spans, we can: 1. Cover the entire execution trace. 2. Keep the platform future-proof 3. Leverage an amazing OpenLLMetry (https://github.com/traceloop/openllmetry https://github.com/traceloop/openllmetry), open-source package for span production.
The key difference is that we tie text analytics directly to execution traces. Rich text data makes LLM traces unique, so we let you track “semantic metrics” (like what your AI agent is actually saying) and connect those metrics to where they happen in the trace. If you want to know if your AI drive-through agent made an upsell, you can design an LLM extraction pipeline in our builder (more on it later), host it on Laminar, and handle everything from event requests to output logging. Processing requests simply come as events in the Otel span.
We think it’s a win to separate core app logic from LLM event processing. Most devs don’t want to manage background queues for LLM analytics processing but still want insights into how their Agents or RAGs are working.
Our Pipeline Builder uses graph UI where nodes are LLM and util functions, and edges showing data flow. We built a custom task execution engine with support of parallel branch executions, cycles and branches (it’s overkill for simple pipelines, but it’s extremely cool and we’ve spent a lot of time designing a robust engine). You can also call pipelines directly as API endpoints. We found them to be extremely useful for iterating on and separating LLM logic. Laminar also traces pipeline directly, which removes the overhead of sending large outputs over the network.
One thing missing from all LLM observability platforms right now is an adequate search over traces. We’re attacking this problem by indexing each span in a vector DB and performing hybrid search at query time. This feature is still in beta, but we think it’s gonna be crucial part of our platform going forward.
We also support evaluations. We loved the “run everything locally, send results to a server” approach from Braintrust and Weights & Biases, so we did that too: a simple SDK and nice dashboards to track everything. Evals are still early, but we’re pushing hard on them.
Our goal is to make Laminar the Supabase for LLMOps - the go-to open-source comprehensive platform for all things LLMs / GenAI. In it’s current shape, Laminar is just few weeks old and developing rapidly, we’d love any feedback or for you to give Laminar a try in your LLM projects!
- dpflug 2y ago[flagged]
- skull8888888 2y agoTurns out there quite a few companies / projects named Laminar. I really like the name, couldn't buy a .com or .ai domain tho, so settled on lmnr.ai. But it's been growing on me.
- flashgordon 2y agoLmnop would have had a ring to it with laminar ops!
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- 7thpower 2y agoI’m always game for an LLM observability platform that is potentially affordable, at least during the early phases of development. I was using DD at work and found it to be incredibly helpful but now that I am on my own, I am much more price sensitive. Still, having a low friction way to see how things are running, check inputs/outputs is a game changer. One challenge I have run into is a lack of support for Anthropic models. The platforms that do have support are missing key pieces of info like the system prompt. (Prob a skill issue on my end). Also they seem to all be tightly coupled to langchain, etc which is a no-go. Will check this out over the next week or two. Very exciting!
- skull8888888 2y agoTotally agree, observability is a must for LLM apps. We wanted to build something of extremely high quality but to be affordable for solo devs, that's why open-source and why very generous free tier on our managed version. Regarding Anthropic instrumentation, we support it out of the box! You don't even need to wrap anything, just do laminar initialize and you should see detailed traces. We also support images! Hit me up at robert@lmnr.ai if you need help onboarding or setting up local version