Quick Tip originally published on lukaswalter.dev .

Use the Aspire Dashboard Standalone

Many see Aspire as a full orchestration suite, but the Dashboard can run standalone.

If you want a beautiful, real-time UI for your logs, traces, and metrics without the full orchestration overhead (or if you're working on a non-Aspire project), you can run it solo. It's a perfect, lightweight OTLP-compatible viewer for any language. C#, Go, Python, you name it.

Run it via Docker

This is the fastest way to spin it up:

docker run --rm -it \ -p 18888:18888 \ -p 4317:18889 \ -p 4318:18890 \ --name aspire-dashboard \ mcr.microsoft.com/dotnet/aspire-dashboard:latest

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Port 18888: The Dashboard UI.

Port 4317: OTLP/gRPC ingestion.

Port 4318: OTLP/HTTP ingestion.

Accessing the Dashboard

By default, the dashboard is secured.

When it starts up, it generates a unique Browser Token for your session.

If you use the docker run command, the dashboard will print a login URL to the…