Axiom is a machine data platform: a hosted service that collects, stores and queries event and telemetry data, such as application logs, metrics and traces. Telemetry is the data that running software emits about itself; observability is the practice of using it to understand and debug a system.
Applications send events over HTTP, through OpenTelemetry (OTel) collectors and SDKs, or through integrations such as Vercel and Cloudflare. Ingest is schema-less: events need no fixed structure in advance, and fields are interpreted at query time (schema-on-read). EventDB stores timestamped events with 25 to 50 times compression and runs each query on short-lived serverless runtimes; MetricsDB stores time-series metrics with many distinct tag values (high cardinality). In the web Console, users write queries in APL, a language in which each step is piped into the next, build dashboards, and set monitors that alert on a threshold or an anomaly through Slack, email, PagerDuty and other channels. An MCP server lets AI agents query the data.
Axiom is a hosted service. The Personal plan is free; Axiom Cloud charges a monthly platform fee plus usage.