What is Arize AX?
Arize AX is the commercial platform from Arize AI for watching and improving LLM applications and agents. It records traces of every model call, tool call and retrieval step, scores them with LLM judges, agent judges or code, and lets you run experiments that compare prompt, model or retrieval changes against a dataset. Signal groups repeated failures into ranked issues with trace evidence, and Alyx, an assistant built into the product, answers questions about your own traces in plain language.
It is built on OpenTelemetry and Arize's OpenInference conventions, the same instrumentation as Arize's open-source Phoenix, with pre-built integrations for more than 30 providers and frameworks. AX Free costs nothing for 25,000 spans and 1 GB a month with 15-day retention; AX Pro is $50 a month for 50,000 spans, 10 GB and 30-day retention; Enterprise is custom and adds SSO, audit logs, HIPAA and self-hosting.
Dynatrace completed its acquisition of Arize on 1 October 2026. Dynatrace says AX remains available as a standalone product and that Arize capabilities will be folded into Dynatrace over time; no pricing or contract changes have been announced.
How much does Arize AX cost?
| Plan | Price | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| AX Free | $0 | 25,000 spans and 1 GB a month, 15-day retention, unlimited users |
| AX Pro | $50/month | 50,000 spans and 10 GB a month, 30-day retention, email support |
| AX Enterprise | Custom | SSO, audit logs, HIPAA, SaaS or self-hosted |
AX Free $0 (25,000 spans, 1 GB a month, 15-day retention); AX Pro $50/month (50,000 spans, 10 GB, 30-day retention); Enterprise custom with SSO, HIPAA and self-hosting. Unlimited users on every plan.
Is Arize AX worth it?
Your agent worked in the demo and now gives a strange answer to one customer in fifty. Finding out why means reading every step it took, and that is hard to do from logs alone.
Arize AX records each step for you: the prompt, the model's reply, every tool it called and what each one cost. It then scores those runs with an LLM judge, an agent judge or your own code, so you see which kinds of request go wrong instead of reading traces one by one. Its Signal feature groups repeated failures into a ranked list with the evidence attached, and a built-in assistant called Alyx answers questions such as which tool calls fail most often.
The instrumentation is the part worth noticing. AX uses OpenTelemetry and Arize's OpenInference conventions, the same as the free Phoenix project, and OpenTelemetry accepted part of OpenInference as a code donation in June 2026. If you outgrow AX, your app can send the same traces to Phoenix or another OpenTelemetry backend without being rewritten. LangSmith also accepts OpenTelemetry, but it is happiest with LangChain code.
The catch: the paid plan is small. AX Pro gives 50,000 spans a month for $50, and an agent that makes ten tool calls per request uses that up in fewer than 5,000 conversations. The pricing page lists no overage rate, so beyond that you are talking to sales. SSO, audit logs, HIPAA and self-hosting are all Enterprise only. Then there is the owner: Dynatrace completed the purchase on 1 October 2026, and while it says AX stays available as a standalone product, it also says Arize will be merged into Dynatrace over time and the joint roadmap is still being written.
Our take: AX is the sensible bet for a team that wants to own its traces in an open format and expects to need a big-company contract anyway. A small team counting dollars gets more room from Braintrust's free tier, or from running Phoenix itself.
Where it earns its place
An ML engineer at a 200-person insurer running a claims-triage agent
Find out which claim types make the agent call the wrong tool
OpenInference auto-instrumentation sends each run to AX; an LLM judge scores tool choice on every trace and Signal ranks the recurring failures. Production volume will pass Pro's 50,000 spans quickly, so budget for an Enterprise quote.
A platform team already paying for Dynatrace
Bring AI agent traces into the same vendor as the rest of their monitoring
AX stays a separate product for now, but Dynatrace says it will link Phoenix and AX data with its wider observability over time. Ask your Dynatrace account team about bundling before signing a separate Arize contract.
A two-person startup building a RAG support bot
Test a prompt change against last month's real questions before shipping it
Save traces as a dataset, run the new prompt as an experiment and compare scores on AX Free, which allows 25,000 spans and unlimited users at no cost. Retention is 15 days, so export anything you want to keep.
Before you commit
- Setup
- Install arize-otel and an OpenInference instrumentor, call register() with your space ID and API key, and traces appear; Arize also offers a CLI and one-command installers for coding agents.
- Integrations
- More than 30 provider and framework integrations through OpenInference, with SDK instrumentors for Python, JavaScript and TypeScript, and Go; any OpenTelemetry exporter can send to its OTLP endpoint.
- Data and privacy
- Arize's trust centre lists SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, PCI DSS 4.0, GDPR, HIPAA and EU data residency; HIPAA, SSO and self-hosting are sold on Enterprise only.
- Cost at scale
- Pro is $50 a month for 50,000 spans and 10 GB; past that, volume is custom-priced on Enterprise and no overage rate is published.
- Limits
- Retention is 15 days on Free and 30 days on Pro; Free gets one space and Pro one organisation with two spaces.
What's good
- Built on OpenTelemetry and OpenInference, so traces are portable
- Same instrumentation as the free, self-hostable Phoenix
- Unlimited users and unlimited evals on every plan
- Signal groups repeated failures into ranked issues with evidence
- SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, HIPAA and EU data residency per its trust centre
What's not
- AX Pro includes only 50,000 spans a month
- No published overage price beyond the plan caps
- SSO, audit logs and HIPAA are Enterprise only
- Product roadmap now set jointly with Dynatrace after the October 2026 acquisition
Best for
Engineering teams running production agents who want hosted tracing and evals on open, portable instrumentation and can negotiate an Enterprise contract.
Arize AX alternatives
Arize AX: common questions
- Is Arize AX worth it?
- Arize AX gives you serious agent tracing and evals on open instrumentation, but its cheap plans run out fast and its roadmap now belongs to Dynatrace. We rate it 4.1 out of 5.
- How much does Arize AX cost?
- AX Free $0 (25,000 spans, 1 GB a month, 15-day retention); AX Pro $50/month (50,000 spans, 10 GB, 30-day retention); Enterprise custom with SSO, HIPAA and self-hosting. Unlimited users on every plan.
- What are the downsides of Arize AX?
- AX Pro includes only 50,000 spans a month; no published overage price beyond the plan caps; sSO, audit logs and HIPAA are Enterprise only; product roadmap now set jointly with Dynatrace after the October 2026 acquisition.
- Who is Arize AX best for?
- Engineering teams running production agents who want hosted tracing and evals on open, portable instrumentation and can negotiate an Enterprise contract.
- How much does Arize AX cost for a team or in production?
- Pro is $50 a month for 50,000 spans and 10 GB; past that, volume is custom-priced on Enterprise and no overage rate is published.
- Is Arize AX safe for company data?
- Arize's trust centre lists SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, PCI DSS 4.0, GDPR, HIPAA and EU data residency; HIPAA, SSO and self-hosting are sold on Enterprise only.
- What are the best Arize AX alternatives?
- The closest alternatives we have reviewed are LangSmith and Braintrust.
Answers checked Oct 26, 2026.
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