Velvet takes a gateway-first approach: instead of instrumenting every service with an SDK, it captures LLM requests by proxying provider traffic and storing it for analysis. That makes it a practical alternative to Langfuse when the goal is fast, centralized visibility across many apps or services with minimal code changes.
The key advantage is a queryable request ledger that can live in a database, which is especially useful for auditing, analytics, and dataset generation. Teams that already have strong data tooling often prefer this model because prompts, responses, usage, and metadata can be explored with familiar workflows like SQL and BI.
This approach can also simplify standardization across OpenAI/Anthropic usage, making it easier to monitor cost and performance consistently across teams. The trade-off is that you may get less application-native span context than full in-app tracing, but for organizations prioritizing capture, governance, and analytics, the proxy model can be the cleaner foundation.