Perplexity Production Checklist

Overview

Complete checklist for deploying Perplexity Sonar API integrations to production. Perplexity-specific concerns: every API call performs a live web search (variable latency), citations link to third-party sites (must validate), and costs scale per-request plus per-token.

Prerequisites

• Staging environment tested
• Production API key generated (separate from dev/staging)
• Monitoring configured
• Cost budget defined

Production Readiness Checklist

API Configuration

• Production PERPLEXITY_API_KEY in secret manager (not env file)
• Key starts with pplx- and has credits loaded
• Separate API keys for dev/staging/prod
• Base URL is https://api.perplexity.ai (not localhost/proxy)
• Model selection configured: sonar for fast, sonar-pro for deep

Code Quality

• All search calls wrapped in retry with exponential backoff
• Rate limiting implemented (50 RPM default)
• Query sanitization strips PII before sending to Perplexity
• Citations parsed from response (not extracted from text)
• max_tokens set on all requests (prevents runaway costs)
• Timeouts configured: 15s for sonar, 30s for sonar-pro
• Error handling covers 401, 402, 429, 500+ status codes
• No hardcoded API keys in source code

Performance

• Result caching implemented for repeated queries
• Cache TTL appropriate: 30min for news, 4hrs for research, 24hrs for facts
• Streaming enabled for user-facing search (reduces perceived latency)
• Request queue prevents burst overload
• search_domain_filter used where appropriate (reduces search time)

Monitoring

• Latency tracked per model (sonar ~2s, sonar-pro ~5s, deep-research ~30s)
• Error rate monitored (alert on >5% failure rate)
• Token usage tracked for cost projection
• Citation count per response logged (quality signal)
• 429 rate limit errors tracked with alert

Cost Controls

• Monthly budget cap set on API key
• Model routing: simple queries to sonar, complex to sonar-pro
• max_tokens capped per endpoint
• Cache hit rate monitored (target >30%)
• Cost per query tracked by model

Graceful Degradation

async function searchWithFallback(query: string) {
  try {
    // Primary: sonar-pro for deep answers
    return await perplexity.chat.completions.create({
      model: "sonar-pro",
      messages: [{ role: "user", content: query }],
      max_tokens: 2048,
    });
  } catch (err: any) {
    if (err.status === 429 || err.status >= 500) {
      // Fallback: sonar for faster, cheaper response
      return await perplexity.chat.completions.create({
        model: "sonar",
        messages: [{ role: "user", content: query }],
        max_tokens: 512,
      });
    }
    throw err;
  }
}

Health Check Endpoint

app.get("/health/perplexity", async (req, res) => {
  const start = Date.now();
  try {
    const response = await perplexity.chat.completions.create({
      model: "sonar",
      messages: [{ role: "user", content: "ping" }],
      max_tokens: 5,
    });
    res.json({
      status: "healthy",
      latencyMs: Date.now() - start,
      model: response.model,
    });
  } catch (err: any) {
    res.status(503).json({
      status: "unhealthy",
      error: err.status || err.message,
      latencyMs: Date.now() - start,
    });
  }
});

Alerting Rules

Error Handling

Output

• Production-ready Perplexity integration with all checks passing
• Health check endpoint for monitoring
• Graceful degradation from sonar-pro to sonar
• Alerting rules configured

Resources

• Perplexity API Documentation
• Model Pricing

Next Steps

For version upgrades, see perplexity-upgrade-migration.