Phoenix Self-Hosting Checklist

Look forPhoenix's Elastic License 2.0 allows free self-hosting on your own infrastructure or cloud account, with no feature gates. It forbids offering Phoenix to third parties as a hosted or managed service. Arize calls Phoenix open source, and ELv2 is not on the Open Source Initiative's approved list, so check it against your policy. The client library carries a separate license. After a contributor asked in 2025, Arize moved arize-phoenix-client to Apache-2.0 in November 2025.

Look forUse PostgreSQL 14 or later for a shared instance. The default SQLite database lives in the working directory, so a container stopped without a volume loses its traces. Phoenix runs as one container beside PostgreSQL. One developer measured it at about 400 MiB, against 1,848 MiB for the four-container Langfuse v4 stack it replaced.

Look forTurn on authentication before you share Phoenix. With it off, anyone who can reach the container can use the UI and API. Set PHOENIX_ENABLE_AUTH and a secret. Connect OAuth2 through a provider such as Keycloak or Microsoft Entra ID, or use LDAP. Seed the admin account at deployment and test the identity provider. One team found Keycloak let users sign in regardless of role. Another hit an Entra ID configuration error.

Look forEach Phoenix instance is one tenant. The admin, member, and viewer roles apply to the whole instance, so a viewer sees every project. Per-project roles are on Arize's roadmap as Phoenix issue #11646, which was still open on October 25, 2026, and a maintainer confirmed in July 2026 that they will come to self-hosted Phoenix. Until they ship, give each team or environment its own instance with its own database or PostgreSQL schema. AX already has organizations and spaces with custom roles.

Look forPhoenix keeps data indefinitely by default. From Phoenix 9.0, set PHOENIX_DEFAULT_RETENTION_POLICY_DAYS or a per-project policy by age or trace count, which a cron schedule enforces. A policy covers a whole project, so traces that need longer retention belong in a project with a longer policy. Phoenix has moved traces between projects since August 2025, from the UI or its GraphQL API.

Look forSize PostgreSQL for your span volume and load-test your own queries. Users report slow attribute searches on Cloud SQL at about 100,000 interactions a day, and an Arize maintainer endorsed adding PostgreSQL indexes on the attributes you search. Other reports describe OpenShift deadlocks that lost traces and a connection pool exhausted by two replicas under sustained ingestion. Projects above 10,000 spans failed to load behind nginx, and large gRPC exports returned RESOURCE_EXHAUSTED. Phoenix scales by adding instances against one database. OpenTelemetry head or tail sampling cuts volume.

Look forPin the image version, as Arize recommends for production. Read the release notes and test database migrations on a copy. Arize lists each major version's required steps in MIGRATION.md. Version 13 removed the old evaluations endpoint and client, which broke direct REST calls. It also builds an index on span attributes at startup. Arize tells teams with PostgreSQL databases of hundreds of GiB to create that index concurrently before upgrading, because the migration can lock the table for a long time.

Look forSelf-hosted Phoenix keeps traces, evaluations, and datasets away from Arize. PHOENIX_TELEMETRY_ENABLED=false turns off web analytics. PHOENIX_ALLOW_EXTERNAL_RESOURCES=false stops its internet requests for air-gapped use. In September 2026 an Arize maintainer confirmed that pip install arize-phoenix[container,pg] is a supported offline install, and that the published arizephoenix/phoenix image bundles the evaluator runtimes and runs offline. Older releases tried to download a WASM binary at startup and timed out behind a firewall. Arize made the external-resources flag cover that download on October 1, 2026, so deploy a release that includes the fix.

Look forMove to AX when you need SAML SSO, access split by team, managed monitors and alerts, HIPAA, or a database Arize runs at your volume. Arize's migration skill moves traces, datasets, experiments, and stored eval results. Recreate evaluator definitions, prompts, and annotations in AX yourself.