Feature Request: Emit cost / premium-request metric via OpenTelemetry (parity with Claude Code's claude_code.cost.usage)
- Dominant language
- Shell
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- Merged PRs (30d)
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Description
### Describe the feature or problem you'd like to solve
The Copilot CLI's OpenTelemetry export is great for usage analytics, but it emits **no cost or billing metric**. The metrics currently available are:
- `gen_ai_client_token_usage` (input/output tokens, by model)
- `gen_ai_client_operation_duration`
- `github_copilot_agent_turn_count`
- `github_copilot_tool_call_count` / `..._duration`
- `github_copilot_mcp_server_connection_count`
None of these carry a cost figure. As a result, anyone building a cost dashboard has to **re-derive spend on the consumer side** — either by hand-coding per-million-token list prices per model (an API-equivalent *estimate* that is not the actual Copilot bill), or by trying to reconstruct premium-request consumption, which isn't possible from the telemetry because:
- premium requests are billed per **prompt × a per-model multiplier** (overage $0.04/request), not per token;
- `github_copilot_agent_turn_count` has **no model label**, so turns can't be multiplied by the correct per-model multiplier;
- request counts include agentic tool iterations, which inflate any call-count proxy.
So the one thing teams actually want — "how much did this cost / how many premium requests did it consume" — is the one thing the telemetry can't express today.
### Prior art: Claude Code
Claude Code already exports cost directly via OTel ([docs](https://code.claude.com/docs/en/monitoring-usage)):
| Metric | Description | Unit |
| --- | --- | --- |
| `claude_code.cost.usage` | Cost of the Claude Code session | USD |
| `claude_code.token.usage` | Tokens used | tokens |
This makes a "cost per model / per session" dashboard a one-line query with no client-side price tables.
### Proposed solution
Emit a first-class cost/billing metric from the Copilot CLI's OTel exporter, ideally with the same labels already present on the token metric (`gen_ai_request_model` / `gen_ai_response_model`, and `session.id` if available). Any of the following would solve it, in rough order of preference:
1. **`github_copilot.premium_request.count`** — premium requests consumed, labeled by model (this is the true Copilot billing unit). The CLI already knows the prompt boundaries and the model multiplier, so it can compute this authoritatively where consumers cannot.
2. **`github_copilot.cost.usage`** (unit USD) — direct parity with `claude_code.cost.usage`, for accounts on API/consumption pricing.
3. At minimum, a **`multiplier`** attribute on an existing per-model metric, plus a documented "1 premium request per prompt" counter, so consumers can compute cost correctly.
### Example prompts or workflows
In Grafana/Mimir, a dashboard panel would become:
```promql
sum by (gen_ai_response_model) (github_copilot_premium_request_count)
```
instead of today's brittle client-side approximation:
```promql
sum(gen_ai_client_token_usage_sum{gen_ai_token_type="input",gen_ai_response_model=~"claude-opus.*"})*5/1e6
+ sum(gen_ai_client_token_usage_sum{gen_ai_token_type="output",gen_ai_response_model=~"claude-opus.*"})*25/1e6
+ ... # repeated per model class, hard-coded list prices, NOT the real Copilot bill
```
### Additional context
Related, but none cover emitting a cost/credit **OTel metric**:
- #3474 — track dollar amount spent in a session (UI/session, not telemetry)
- #3686 — cost data in Copilot hooks (hooks, not OTel metrics)
- #2471 — OTel telemetry parity with Claude Code (closed; established the metrics that ship today, but no cost metric)
Context: I built a self-hosted Grafana stack for Copilot CLI telemetry and had to fake the cost panel with client-side list-price math, which I can only honestly label "API-equivalent estimate, not your Copilot bill." A CLI-emitted premium-request/cost metric would make this exact and trustworthy.
Contributor guide
Research direction
Start by locating the Copilot CLI's existing OpenTelemetry exporter and the metric definitions listed in the issue. Compare the available model and session attributes with the proposed premium-request or cost signals, then verify the chosen metric and labels through the repository's telemetry tests or validation path. Done means an authoritative billing metric is exported with documented units and usable model or session dimensions.
Written by the indexing model from the issue text.
Assessment
- Tech stack
- grafana, shell
- Domain
- cli, observability
- Issue type
- Feature
- Difficulty
- 5/5
- Estimated time
- Over a week
- Activity status
- Quiet
- Clarity
- Mostly clear
- Newbie friendliness
- 42/100