The outcome

Get into the official LangSmith experience with the right account and a setup you understand.

LangSmith is a LLM application platform for tracing, observability, offline and online evaluation, prompt versioning, feedback, and agent deployment. Tracing agent and LLM runs, investigating failures, comparing prompts and models on datasets, collecting feedback, monitoring production quality, and promoting tested versions. This guide narrows that broad capability into one repeatable outcome, with checkpoints that keep the source material and your judgment in the loop.

Before you begin

Set the boundary before the tool starts.

Choose one real task, identify who will use the result, and decide what evidence or test will make the result acceptable. Gather only the source material needed for that task. If the work contains confidential, personal, regulated, or client-owned information, confirm that the platform and account are approved before sharing it.

Troiana principle

AI should make the work easier to inspect. If the workflow removes the source, the owner, or the review step, redesign the workflow.

Step by step

A workflow you can repeat.

  1. 01

    Start at https://www.langchain.com/langsmith and confirm the domain before entering account or payment information.

  2. 02

    For desktop use, follow the official download link. Current availability: LangSmith is available as a browser-based cloud service with SDK and OpenTelemetry integrations, plus enterprise self-hosted observability, evaluation, and deployment options..

  3. 03

    A LangSmith account and scoped API key or a maintained self-hosted installation, explicit tracing and retention policy, redaction controls, representative evaluation data, and access-separated workspaces.

  4. 04

    Sign in with the account you intend to keep using, then review plan, data, notification, and permission settings.

  5. 05

    Run one low-risk test task before connecting sensitive files, repositories, or workspace data.

Working standard

What good use looks like.

  • Use official download pages.
  • Review permissions during setup.
  • Keep installers and applications updated.

Tracing may capture prompts, responses, tool arguments, retrieved documents, personal data, secrets, or proprietary content. Retention differs by tier and datasets can outlive source traces. LLM-as-judge scores are model opinions and require calibration against human decisions. Use least-privilege keys and workspaces, conditional tracing, redaction, explicit retention, deletion tests, evaluator versioning, spend limits, and human review before treating a dashboard score as a release decision.

Official references

Check the current product documentation.

Features, plan limits, availability, and data controls change. These official pages are the starting points used for this collection.