Dev Console (Dashboard Engine)

Active Agent ships a local development console as a Rails engine: every agent generation recorded as a trace with a span waterfall, plus a metrics overview — running inside your app against your own database while you build. It uses the same telemetry pipeline as the hosted activeagents.ai platform, which is the production observability product: what you see locally in development is what the platform shows (plus evaluations, cost estimates, retention, and team workspaces) once you point telemetry at it. Every platform workspace starts with a free low-volume trial.

![Dashboard: traces list with expandable span timelines]

Quick start

rails generate active_agent:dashboard:install
rails db:migrate

The generator:

• copies the active_agent_telemetry_traces migration (plus agent, run, template, sandbox and recording tables for the full install),
• mounts the engine at /active_agent,
• writes config/initializers/active_agent_dashboard.rb.

Then enable telemetry with local storage in config/active_agent.yml:

telemetry:
  enabled: true
  local_storage: true

That's it. Run any agent and open /active_agent — each generation appears as a trace with prompt/LLM/tool spans, timing, token usage (input / output / thinking), provider and model.

What you get

Page	Path	Contents
Traces	/active_agent/traces	Every generation: agent + action, status, duration, tokens; expandable span timeline; All/Errors filter; 30s auto-refresh
Trace detail	/active_agent/traces/:id	Span waterfall with relative offsets, token breakdown, error details, raw payload
Metrics	/active_agent/traces/metrics	Last-24h totals: traces, tokens, avg duration, error rate, active agents; per-agent statistics
Ingest API	POST /active_agent/api/traces	JSON trace ingestion (used by local_storage mode and remote SDKs)

Time-series charts on the metrics page use the optional groupdate gem when present and degrade gracefully without it.

Authentication

The dashboard has no authentication by default. Anyone who can reach the route can read your traces. Before deploying anywhere non-local, set an authentication method in the initializer:

ActiveAgent::Dashboard.configure do |config|
  # Any proc that authenticates the request — Devise, Rails 8 sessions, basic auth…
  config.authentication_method = ->(controller) do
    controller.authenticate_admin!
  end
end

Or constrain the mount in config/routes.rb:

authenticate :user, ->(u) { u.admin? } do
  mount ActiveAgent::Dashboard::Engine => "/active_agent"
end

The local ingest endpoint is unauthenticated in local mode by design (it receives traces from your own app process). In multi-tenant mode it requires a Bearer token (see below).

Sending traces to a remote endpoint instead

Point telemetry at any compatible receiver — including the hosted platform — instead of (or in addition to) local storage:

telemetry:
  enabled: true
  endpoint: https://api.activeagents.ai/v1/traces
  api_key: <%= ENV["ACTIVEAGENTS_API_KEY"] %>

The wire format is documented in telemetry.md under "self-hosting endpoint requirements" — anything that speaks it can feed or receive these traces.

Multi-tenant mode (running your own platform)

The engine also supports account-scoped deployments — this is exactly how the hosted platform runs it:

ActiveAgent::Dashboard.configure do |config|
  config.multi_tenant = true
  config.account_class = "Account"        # must have a telemetry_api_key column
  config.trace_model_class = "TelemetryTrace" # optional model override
end

In multi-tenant mode the ingest API authenticates with Authorization: Bearer <account.telemetry_api_key> and processes traces asynchronously through ActiveAgent::ProcessTelemetryTracesJob (idempotent per trace_id, capped at 100 traces per request). Add an increment_telemetry_usage! method to your account model to hook usage tracking or rate limiting.

Relationship to the hosted platform

	Dev console (this engine)	activeagents.ai (production)
Intended use	Development	Production monitoring
Traces + span waterfall	✓	✓
Metrics + per-agent stats	✓	✓
Trace ingest API	✓ (single tenant, local)	✓ (multi-tenant, quotas)
Conversation persistence	via solid_agent	✓ built in
Evaluations, cost estimates, retention, team accounts	—	✓

One pipeline, two contexts: the console shows your traces while you develop; the platform runs the same engine multi-tenant with managed infrastructure for production. Free workspaces get a low-volume trial tier; paid plans lift the quotas.

Conversation persistence

Pair the dashboard with the solid_agent gem to persist full conversations (contexts, messages, generations) alongside traces; its generation records carry the same trace_id for correlation:

class ApplicationAgent < ActiveAgent::Base
  include SolidAgent::HasContext
  has_context contextual: :user
end