Otel is only a quarter of what the llm proxies solve for you. What happens when an agent goes down some random rabbit hole and burns through $100 before you even notice? It's nice to have post-disaster visibility with Otel, but even self hosting an LLM proxy prevents the disaster.
Shameless plug, I've been building Relay for this exact reason. You get real-time visibility into what your agents are doing, how much they're spending, and can set hard limits so things don't spiral out of control. Plus a lot of other features they bring to the table if you want.
It's open source and self-hostable too.
https://github.com/anchorshell/relay https://anchorshell.com/
You can do that with MCP or hooks as well.