The dashboard
localhost:3030 is the visual face of your knowledge graph — Explorer, Insights, Fleet, and Cortex, plus a live query-quota meter.
memtrace start serves an HTTP API and a dashboard on port 3030. It's the same graph your MCP tools query, rendered as a live picture instead of a tool response — four top-level views: Explorer, Insights, Fleet, and Cortex.
Overview#
$ memtrace start # opens http://localhost:3030 once indexing is underway
Use --headless to keep the API and dashboard serving without opening a browser tab — the right choice for CI runners and agent hosts that don't need the visual.
Explorer#
Explorer is the default page: an interactive graph canvas of your indexed code, with a sidebar of six tabs, a node inspector, and a temporal timeline along the bottom.
Sidebar tabs
- Files — browse the directory structure and open indexed symbol surfaces. With a single repo selected, use Add to .memtraceignore to append a path and evict it from the live graph — see .memtraceignore.
- Value — tracks Memtrace calls, graph context, and source-backed savings: a running ledger of the token/time value the graph is returning, backed by a persistent session + aggregate ledger.
- Communities — inspect clustered neighborhoods (Louvain communities) and the members that pull each one together.
- Processes — follow ordered call chains and operational flow symbols reconstructed from the graph.
- Search — jump to symbols, scopes, and signatures without leaving the graph view.
- Topology — switches the main stage from the code graph to a service-to-service dependency flow (API endpoints, outbound calls, cross-repo edges).
The canvas itself shows indexing-progress and engine-readiness banners while a repo is still being processed, kind filters to narrow what's drawn, and a node inspector panel for details on whatever you click.
Temporal timeline
Below the canvas, the temporal timeline lets you scrub through the graph's history — the same bi-temporal (branch × time) version history that backs get_evolution and get_timeline over MCP, but as a visual scrubber instead of a tool call.
How the Value counters and estimates increase#
The Value tab is backed by the persistent Memtrace tool-call ledger. It updates when an agent completes a value-relevant Memtrace lookup; the dashboard polls the current session every five seconds and also receives live ledger events. Fleet coordination heartbeats and other coordination/diagnostic calls are recorded for their own audit surfaces but are excluded from the Value query count.
| Metric | How it is computed |
|---|---|
| Queries | Count of value-relevant Memtrace tool calls in the selected session or ledger scope. |
| Measured Memtrace time | Sum of observed wall-clock elapsed_ms for those calls. It is measured, not synthesized. |
| Graph context delivered | Approximate byte count of the compact Memtrace responses returned to the agent. |
| Source-route baseline | Bytes from the resolved source files and bounded line windows an unaided agent would have needed to read, with overlapping windows merged. |
| Context reduction | max(0, source baseline − graph context) ÷ source baseline. A call that returns more context than its baseline does not create negative savings. |
| Efficiency multiple | Source-route baseline bytes ÷ graph context bytes. |
| Input cost avoided | Estimated input tokens reduced × the selected model input-token price. The model price can come from the live catalog or a user-entered custom rate. |
| Time returned | A raw-context processing equivalent derived from the measured context ratio and observed Memtrace throughput; it is not a promise of wall-clock time saved. |
A call can be valuable without having a defensible raw-source comparison. Metadata, history, API topology, and other derived answers still increase the query ledger, but source-backed byte savings are only credited when the response has a defined baseline. Older ledger entries created before elapsed-time or byte-savings fields existed still count as calls and contribute zero for the missing measurement.
The Value tab explains what Memtrace returned and how compactly. The query-quota meter counts billable tool calls against a plan. A non-billable lookup can appear in Value, while Fleet coordination calls appear in neither Value queries nor plan usage.
Insights#
Insights is an editorial, four-tab briefing over the same graph — architecture seams, change tempo, risk surface, and API hygiene — plus a health widget and a session-efficiency tracker.
- Architecture — cluster seams and dominant symbols: where the graph concentrates weight and where boundaries are being crossed.
- Activity — change tempo and episode cadence: whether the repo is quietly compounding or actively churning.
- Quality — complexity hotspots, fragile functions, and dead-code candidates: the risk surface.
- API — endpoint coverage and cross-repo HTTP topology: where product flows cross service boundaries.
For a local daemon running your own .memdb — the normal, default setup — Insights is fully unlocked from the start; there's no plan requirement to see it. The referral-gated path (two confirmed referrals: an invitee signs in, gets a license, and sends their first heartbeat) only applies to external/hosted-store deployments that don't own their own local database.
Fleet control room#
The Fleet page is the dashboard face of Memtrace's multi-agent coordination layer: a 3D fleet map as the overview, plus four classic sections underneath — decisions, work, safety, and activity. The activity section prefers the durable coordination audit trail; against an older daemon that predates the audit endpoint, or history recorded before it, it falls back to recorded episode history instead of going blank.
Cortex#
The Cortex tab is the decision-memory workspace — distinct from the Explorer's code/git graph. It renders a decision stream, a decision detail view, a timeline, a dedicated Cortex graph (a WebGL force-directed layout of decisions and the files they shaped), a diff view, a dreaming panel, and a cap banner. The 3D scene also branded "Cortex" is a separate thing — it's the Fleet page's Overview, a three.js "living brain" view of the fleet.
The query-quota meter#
A query-quota meter is built into the dashboard so you can see plan usage without leaving the UI. It counts billable graph-query tool calls against your plan's monthly (and, on Community, daily throttle) allowance — the meter only counts calls, it never ships the contents of your queries anywhere.
