Skip to content

Setting Up Aspire Dashboard Locally

The .NET Aspire Dashboard is a web-based UI for viewing OpenTelemetry traces, metrics, and logs in real-time. This guide will help you set up the dashboard locally for viewing telemetry data from your application.

Prerequisites

  1. Docker: The Aspire Dashboard runs in a Docker container. You need to have Docker installed on your machine.

    If you are using GitHub Codespaces, Docker is available in the environment.

Setup Instructions

  1. Open a terminal and pull the latest Aspire Dashboard Docker image:

    docker pull mcr.microsoft.com/dotnet/aspire-dashboard:latest

  2. Run the Aspire Dashboard container:

    docker run --rm -it -p 18888:18888 -p 4317:18889 -d --name aspire-dashboard -e DOTNET_DASHBOARD_UNSECURED_ALLOW_ANONYMOUS=true mcr.microsoft.com/dotnet/aspire-dashboard:latest

    This command will start the dashboard and map the necessary ports for the web UI and OTLP endpoint.

    The environment variable DOTNET_DASHBOARD_UNSECURED_ALLOW_ANONYMOUS=true allows you to access the dashboard without authentication, which is useful for local development and GitHub Codespaces.

  3. Access the dashboard:

    • If you are running locally, open your web browser and navigate to http://localhost:18888.
    • If you are using GitHub Codespaces, go to the Ports panel in VS Code, find port 18888, and click the globe icon (🌐) to open the dashboard in your browser.

Aspire Dashboard Overview

The dashboard has three main tabs:

  1. Traces: View distributed traces across your application, drill down into individual spans, analyze execution flow and performance, and view LLM prompts and tool calls (when sensitive data is enabled).

    Aspire Dashboard - Trace View

  2. Metrics: Monitor application performance metrics, track resource utilization, and view custom metrics from your agents.

  3. Logs: View structured logs from your application, filter and search log entries.

    Aspire Dashboard - Span Details

Additional Resources