Context

When migrating from LangSmith SaaS to a self-hosted deployment, you may notice that the Input/Output filter options are missing from the trace filtering interface. These filters, which allow you to search through trace inputs and outputs, may not appear in your self-hosted environment even though they were available in the SaaS version.

Answer

The Input/Output filters are missing because they rely on ClickHouse search indexing, which is automatically disabled when using LangSmith-managed ClickHouse in self-hosted deployments.

This behavior occurs when clickhouse.external.hybrid is set to true in your Helm values.yaml file. This setting:

• Automatically disables ClickHouse search indexing (sets FF_CH_SEARCH_ENABLED=false)

• Prevents sensitive data (inputs, outputs, errors) from being stored as searchable tokens in ClickHouse

• Keeps that data only in your blob storage (S3/GCS) within your VPC for security

• Hides Input/Output filter options and Full-Text Search in the UI since there's no indexed data to query

Important: Do not change clickhouse.external.hybrid to false while using LangSmith-managed ClickHouse. This flag is required for the managed ClickHouse integration to work correctly, including proper blob storage routing.

Alternative Solution: For filtering based on specific data from your traces, the best approach with your current setup is to use metadata and tags. You can attach custom metadata and tags to your traces at instrumentation time, and then filter on those in the UI. More details here: https://docs.langchain.com/langsmith/add-metadata-tags