Dashboard — Complete Reference

The Aspire Dashboard provides real-time observability for all resources in your distributed application. It launches automatically with aspire run and can also run standalone.

Features

Resources view

Displays all resources (projects, containers, executables) with:

• Name and type (Project, Container, Executable)
• State (Starting, Running, Stopped, FailedToStart, etc.)
• Start time and uptime
• Endpoints — clickable URLs for each exposed endpoint
• Source — project path, container image, or executable path
• Actions — Stop, Start, Restart buttons

Console logs

Aggregated raw stdout/stderr from all resources:

• Filter by resource name
• Search within logs
• Auto-scroll with pause
• Color-coded by resource

Structured logs

Application-level structured logs (via ILogger, OpenTelemetry):

• Filterable by resource, log level, category, message content
• Expandable — click to see full log entry with all properties
• Correlated with traces — click to jump to the related trace
• Supports .NET ILogger structured logging properties
• Supports OpenTelemetry log signals from any language

Distributed traces

End-to-end request traces across all services:

• Waterfall view — shows the full call chain with timing
• Span details — HTTP method, URL, status code, duration
• Database spans — SQL queries, connection details
• Messaging spans — queue operations, topic publishes
• Error highlighting — failed spans shown in red
• Cross-service correlation — trace context propagated automatically for .NET; manual for other languages

Metrics

Real-time and historical metrics:

• Runtime metrics — CPU, memory, GC, thread pool
• HTTP metrics — request rate, error rate, latency percentiles
• Custom metrics — any metrics your services emit via OpenTelemetry
• Chartable — time-series graphs for each metric

GenAI Visualizer

For applications using AI/LLM integrations:

• Token usage — prompt tokens, completion tokens, total tokens per request
• Prompt/completion pairs — see the exact prompt sent and response received
• Model metadata — which model, temperature, max tokens
• Latency — time per AI call
• Requires services to emit GenAI semantic conventions via OpenTelemetry

Dashboard URL

By default, the dashboard runs on an auto-assigned port. Find it:

• In the terminal output when aspire run starts
• Via MCP: list_resources tool
• Override with --dashboard-port:

aspire run --dashboard-port 18888

Standalone Dashboard

Run the dashboard without an AppHost — useful for existing applications that already emit OpenTelemetry:

docker run --rm -d \
  -p 18888:18888 \
  -p 4317:18889 \
  mcr.microsoft.com/dotnet/aspire-dashboard:latest

Configure your services

Point your OpenTelemetry exporters at the dashboard:

# Environment variables for any language's OpenTelemetry SDK
OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT=http://localhost:4317
OTEL_SERVICE_NAME=my-service

Docker Compose example

services:
  dashboard:
    image: mcr.microsoft.com/dotnet/aspire-dashboard:latest
    ports:
      - "18888:18888"
      - "4317:18889"

  api:
    build: ./api
    environment:
      - OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT=http://dashboard:18889
      - OTEL_SERVICE_NAME=api

  worker:
    build: ./worker
    environment:
      - OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT=http://dashboard:18889
      - OTEL_SERVICE_NAME=worker

Dashboard configuration

Authentication

The standalone dashboard supports authentication via browser tokens:

docker run --rm -d \
  -p 18888:18888 \
  -p 4317:18889 \
  -e DASHBOARD__FRONTEND__AUTHMODE=BrowserToken \
  -e DASHBOARD__FRONTEND__BROWSERTOKEN__TOKEN=my-secret-token \
  mcr.microsoft.com/dotnet/aspire-dashboard:latest

OTLP configuration

# Accept OTLP over gRPC (default)
-e DASHBOARD__OTLP__GRPC__ENDPOINT=http://0.0.0.0:18889

# Accept OTLP over HTTP
-e DASHBOARD__OTLP__HTTP__ENDPOINT=http://0.0.0.0:18890

# Require API key for OTLP
-e DASHBOARD__OTLP__AUTHMODE=ApiKey
-e DASHBOARD__OTLP__PRIMARYAPIKEY=my-api-key

Resource limits

# Limit log entries retained
-e DASHBOARD__TELEMETRYLIMITS__MAXLOGCOUNT=10000

# Limit trace entries retained
-e DASHBOARD__TELEMETRYLIMITS__MAXTRACECOUNT=10000

# Limit metric data points
-e DASHBOARD__TELEMETRYLIMITS__MAXMETRICCOUNT=50000

Copilot integration

The dashboard integrates with GitHub Copilot in VS Code:

• Ask questions about resource status
• Query logs and traces in natural language
• The MCP server (see MCP Server) provides the bridge

Non-.NET service telemetry

For non-.NET services to appear in the dashboard, they must emit OpenTelemetry signals. Aspire auto-injects the OTLP endpoint env var when using .WithReference():

Python (OpenTelemetry SDK)

from opentelemetry import trace
from opentelemetry.exporter.otlp.proto.grpc.trace_exporter import OTLPSpanExporter
from opentelemetry.sdk.trace import TracerProvider
from opentelemetry.sdk.trace.export import BatchSpanProcessor
import os

# Aspire injects OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT automatically
endpoint = os.environ.get("OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT", "http://localhost:4317")

provider = TracerProvider()
provider.add_span_processor(BatchSpanProcessor(OTLPSpanExporter(endpoint=endpoint)))
trace.set_tracer_provider(provider)

JavaScript (OpenTelemetry SDK)

const { NodeTracerProvider } = require("@opentelemetry/sdk-trace-node");
const { OTLPTraceExporter } = require("@opentelemetry/exporter-trace-otlp-grpc");

const provider = new NodeTracerProvider();
provider.addSpanProcessor(
  new BatchSpanProcessor(
    new OTLPTraceExporter({
      url: process.env.OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT || "http://localhost:4317",
    })
  )
);
provider.register();