Quickstart: LangSmith Essentials
by LangChain Academy
A free half-hour course from the LangSmith team on tracing, evaluating, deploying and monitoring AI agents.
Overview
LangSmith Essentials is a free quickstart course from LangChain Academy, made by the team that builds LangSmith, LangChain's platform for tracing, evaluating and deploying agents. It has 22 lessons and about half an hour of video, arranged as a welcome section and five modules. Module 1, Agent Observability, explains what tracing is and how to debug an agent in Studio, then ends in a capstone. Module 2 covers pre-production testing with datasets, offline evals and experiments, with a second capstone. Module 3 covers deployments. Module 4, Monitoring in Production, covers online evaluators and automations, annotation queues, Insights and dashboards, and ends in a third capstone. Module 5, Closing the Loop, shows how production data feeds back into testing and includes a lesson on automating the agent development lifecycle with LangSmith Engine. I Programmer reviewed the course in February 2026 and described four modules (tracing, evaluation, prompt engineering in the LangSmith Playground, and deployment of local agent logic as an Agent Server), so the curriculum has been reorganized since then. In Python, tracing starts with the traceable decorator on your functions. The course costs nothing, but LangSmith usage is metered: per I Programmer, the free Personal plan includes 5,000 traces a month and paid plans start at the Developer tier.
At a Glance
- Topic
- Agentic
- Level
- Beginner
- Format
- Course
- Cost
- Free
- Duration
- ~30 min of video across 22 lessons, plus three capstone exercises; self-paced
- Provider
- LangChain Academy
- Hands-on
- Yes — code/exercises
- Certificate
- None
What You’ll Learn
- ✓How tracing records each step of an agent run from input to output
- ✓How to debug agent behavior step by step inside LangSmith Studio
- ✓How to build datasets and run offline evals before shipping an agent
- ✓How to compare prompt and agent changes using LangSmith experiments
- ✓How to deploy agent code as an Agent Server through LangSmith deployments
- ✓How online evaluators, automations and annotation queues watch production traffic
- ✓How to use Insights and dashboards to find failures in production traces
- ✓How production traces feed back into testing to close the improvement loop
Highlights
- •Made by the LangChain team, so it follows the current LangSmith feature set
- •Covers the path from a first trace to production monitoring in about 30 minutes of video
- •Three capstones turn the observability, testing and monitoring lessons into exercises
- •Reorganized since I Programmer's February 2026 review, now ending with a module on LangSmith Engine
Who It’s For
Best For
- ✓Developers putting a first LangChain or LangGraph agent into production
- ✓Teams evaluating LangSmith against other LLM observability and eval tools
- ✓Engineers who need a fast grounding in agent tracing and evals
Prerequisites
- •Working Python and a basic understanding of how LLM agents call tools
- •A LangSmith account (the free Personal plan includes 5,000 traces a month)
FAQ
What is Quickstart: LangSmith Essentials?
A free, short LangChain Academy course on observing, testing, deploying and monitoring AI agents with LangSmith. It is for developers who have built an agent and want traces, offline evals and production monitoring in place before users find the failures. Most of the 22 lessons are short videos, and three capstones turn the observability, testing and monitoring stages into exercises.
Is Quickstart: LangSmith Essentials free?
Quickstart: LangSmith Essentials is free to access.
What level is Quickstart: LangSmith Essentials for?
Quickstart: LangSmith Essentials is aimed at a beginner audience. Recommended background: Working Python and a basic understanding of how LLM agents call tools, A LangSmith account (the free Personal plan includes 5,000 traces a month).
How long does Quickstart: LangSmith Essentials take?
Expect roughly ~30 min of video across 22 lessons, plus three capstone exercises; self-paced. Most learners work through it at their own pace.
What will I learn from Quickstart: LangSmith Essentials?
You'll learn: How tracing records each step of an agent run from input to output; How to debug agent behavior step by step inside LangSmith Studio; How to build datasets and run offline evals before shipping an agent; How to compare prompt and agent changes using LangSmith experiments; How to deploy agent code as an Agent Server through LangSmith deployments; How online evaluators, automations and annotation queues watch production traffic; How to use Insights and dashboards to find failures in production traces; How production traces feed back into testing to close the improvement loop.
Topics
Sources
This page was written from 2 sources, 1 on domains other than academy.langchain.com.