Trace Explorer

trace-explorer/ is a React SPA backed by FastAPI (trace-explorer service, port 8060). It has two views, switchable from the header:

Sessions

• Left sidebar with session list, sortable and searchable, with time-range filter (1h, 6h, 24h, all)
• Stat cards: LLM calls, tool calls, total cost, total tokens, duration
• Nested waterfall with depth-first span tree (Jaeger-style indentation)
• Subagent linking — task tool spans link to child session IDs via parent_session_id
• Right panel with per-span detail: collapsible JSON tree for attributes, formatted cost/token/duration values
• Live updates for in-progress sessions via SSE (GET /api/sessions/{session_id}/spans/stream):
  • spans — full span list; replace client state with this payload. Emitted when any (span_id, duration_ms) pair changes — covers both new spans arriving and the synthetic placeholder being replaced by the real root span on session close.
  • heartbeat — emitted each poll cycle when nothing has changed (keeps the connection alive through proxies)
  • done — emitted once the session closes; client should close the EventSource
  • error — emitted on a Tempo fetch failure; includes a detail field

Open-session placeholder

While a session is running, its child spans (LLM calls, tool calls, agent spans) reference a root span that OpenCode has not yet flushed to Tempo. By default the @devtheops/opencode-plugin-otel plugin closes the root opencode.session span at each session.idle (one root span per turn); with the opt-in OPENCODE_LONG_RUNNING_SESSION_SPANS=1 flag (PR #98, not yet merged upstream) a single root span stays open for the session's whole lifetime and is flushed only when it ends. Either way, the root span is absent from Tempo while its children are still arriving.

The backend detects these orphaned children and synthesises a placeholder root span so the waterfall renders a properly nested tree instead of disconnected top-level entries:

Placeholder field	Value
span_id	The actual parentSpanId referenced by the orphaned children — identical to the real root span's ID
start_ns	Earliest start time among orphaned children
duration_ms	From start_ns to the latest child end time; grows as new child spans arrive
session.is_open	true — signals the session is still running

Because the placeholder and the real root share the same span ID, the placeholder is transparently replaced when the real root arrives: it is no longer an orphan (its parent ID is now in Tempo), so synthesis produces nothing and the real span takes its place. The SSE fingerprints (span_id, duration_ms) — not just span IDs — so this replacement always triggers a spans event and the client receives the correct final duration before the done event fires.

The frontend renders open placeholders with a pulsing bar animation and a Live badge.

Overview

A dashboard-style view aggregating cost, token, model, agent, and tool usage across all sessions for the selected time range (1h, 6h, 24h, all) — computed directly from Tempo span attributes:

• Summary cards: sessions, total cost, total tokens, LLM calls, tool calls
• Time series charts: cost by model, token usage by model, tool calls by tool
• Model usage table and cost-by-model bar chart
• Agent activity table and token-usage-by-agent bar chart
• Tool usage table and tool success-rate bar chart
• LLM calls table (prompt -> model -> outcome) and tool calls table (tool -> parameters -> result), each linking back to the originating session in the Sessions view

Connects to Tempo (TEMPO_URL, default http://tempo:3200).

Configuration

Variable	Default	Description
TEMPO_URL	http://tempo:3200	Backend: base URL of the Tempo HTTP API.
CACHE_TTL_SECONDS	20 (set to 2 in docker-compose.yml)	Backend: how long fetched trace data is cached before re-querying Tempo. Lower values make the UI feel more "live" at the cost of more frequent Tempo queries.
STREAM_POLL_SECONDS	0.5	Backend: how often (seconds) the SSE stream polls Tempo for span changes.
VITE_SESSIONS_POLL_MS	5000 (set to 2000)	Frontend: poll interval for the session list.
VITE_OVERVIEW_POLL_MS	10000 (set to 3000)	Frontend: poll interval for the overview dashboard.

The VITE_* variables are read at build time. They're set in trace-explorer/frontend/.env for local dev/build and as Docker build args in docker-compose.yml for the containerized build.