# 5-Minute Quickstart

Get your AI API calls metered, monitored, and analyzed in minutes. Revenium acts as a zero-latency middleware—just install the SDK, set your keys, and wrap your client.

***

### <i class="fa-list-radio">:list-radio:</i> Prerequisites

Before you begin, you need a Revenium account to route your telemetry.

<a href="https://app.revenium.ai/" class="button primary">Sign in or Register</a>

Then navigate to [**Integrations**](https://app.revenium.ai/connections/sdk-setup) to get your API key

***

### 1. Install the SDK

{% tabs %}
{% tab title="Python" %}

```bash
pip install "revenium-python-sdk[openai]"
```

{% endtab %}

{% tab title="NodeJS" %}

```bash
npm install @revenium/middleware
```

{% endtab %}

{% tab title="Direct API" %}

```bash
curl -X POST "https://api.revenium.ai/meter/v2/ai/completions" \
    -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
    -H "x-api-key: YOUR_REVENIUM_API_KEY" \
    -d '{
      "transactionId": "<your-per-request-uuid>",
      "provider": "openai",
      "model": "gpt-4o-mini",
      "operationType": "CHAT",
      "inputTokenCount": 200,
      "outputTokenCount": 500,
      "totalTokenCount": 700,
      "stopReason": "END",
      "requestTime": "2026-05-22T00:00:00Z",
      "completionStartTime": "2026-05-22T00:00:01Z",
      "responseTime": "2026-05-22T00:00:02Z",
      "requestDuration": 2000,
      "organizationName": "acme-corp",
      "productName": "saas-app-gold-tier",
      "agent": "support-agent",
      "traceId": "conv-28a7e9d4"
    }'
```

{% hint style="info" %}
**`transactionId` is your correlation key.** Generate a UUID in your application *before* the AI call and send it to Revenium. Re-use it on retries — Revenium dedupes by `transactionId` so retries won't double-count. Send only one of `transactionId` or `spanId` per request.
{% endhint %}
{% endtab %}
{% endtabs %}

### 2. Set Environment Variables

Revenium automatically intercepts these variables from your environment to route your telemetry securely.

```bash
# Your Revenium Routing & Auth
# Metering key (rev_mk_*): metering-only scope used by the SDK + OTLP to emit metering events to Revenium.
export REVENIUM_METERING_API_KEY="your_revenium_api_key"
# Provider key: your standard provider API key used for the actual LLM call (swap for ANTHROPIC_API_KEY, etc. when using other providers).
export OPENAI_API_KEY="your_openai_api_key"
```

### 3. Wrap Your Client

Drop this into your existing logic. Revenium intercepts the call, calculates the exact token usage and cost, and forwards the request to OpenAI with zero added latency.

{% tabs %}
{% tab title="Python" %}

```python
import openai
import revenium_middleware.openai

response = openai.chat.completions.create(
    model="gpt-4o-mini",
    messages=[
        {"role": "system", "content": "You are a helpful assistant."},
        {
            "role": "user",
            "content": "What is the meaning of life, the universe and everything?",
        },
    ],
    max_tokens=500,
    usage_metadata={
         "trace_id": "conv-28a7e9d4",
         "task_type": "summarize-customer-issue",
         "subscriber": {
             "id": "subscriberid-1234567890",
             "email": "user@example.com",
             "credential": {
                 "name": "engineering-api-key",
                 "value": "actual-api-key-value"
             }
         },
         "organization_name": "acme-corp",
         "subscription_id": "startup-plan-Q1",
         "product_name": "saas-app-gold-tier",
         "agent": "support-agent",
    },
)
print(response.choices[0].message.content)
```

{% endtab %}

{% tab title="NodeJS" %}

> Requires ESM — set `"type": "module"` in `package.json`, or wrap the call in an `async` function.

```typescript
import { Initialize, GetClient } from "@revenium/middleware/openai";

Initialize();
const openai = GetClient();

const response = await openai.chat().completions().create(
  {
    model: "gpt-4o-mini",
    messages: [
      { role: "system", content: "You are a helpful assistant." },
      {
        role: "user",
        content: "What is the meaning of life, the universe and everything?",
      },
    ],
    max_tokens: 500,
  },
  {
    traceId: "conv-28a7e9d4",
    taskType: "summarize-customer-issue",
    subscriber: {
      id: "subscriberid-1234567890",
      email: "user@example.com",
      credential: {
        name: "engineering-api-key",
        value: "actual-api-key-value",
      },
    },
    organizationName: "acme-corp",
    subscriptionId: "startup-plan-Q1",
    productName: "saas-app-gold-tier",
    agent: "support-agent",
  }
);

console.log(response.choices[0].message.content);
```

{% endtab %}
{% endtabs %}

{% hint style="info" %}
**traceId is the field you plan around.** transactionId is auto-generated by the SDK (from the OpenAI response id) or by Revenium (if you omit it on a direct API call). What you control is `traceId` — use it to group multiple AI calls that belong to one user request, conversation, or workflow. Plan the traceId scheme that maps to your application's session / conversation / job ID.
{% endhint %}

***

### <i class="fa-hand-point-right">:hand-point-right:</i> Next Step: Take Control of Your AI Economics

Seeing a single request on your dashboard is just the beginning. Now that Revenium is connected, choose your next objective to move from basic observability to true economic control:

* [Attribute Your Usage](/track-and-control-costs/instrument-your-code.md)**:** Raw token counts are useless if you don't know *what* generated them. Learn how to inject `organizationName`, `productName`, `agent`, and `traceId` so you can track profit margins per customer and monitor exact agent execution paths.
* [Set Budgets & Alerts](/track-and-control-costs/set-budgets-and-alerts.md): Don't wake up to a massive provider bill. Set hard caps based on your tags and get pinged in Slack the second a customer or agent spikes your spend.
* [Monetize Your Apps](/monetize-your-ai/tutorial-build-usage-based-billing.md): Ready to turn compute costs into revenue? Use your new telemetry data to build automated, usage-based billing for your users.


---

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