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

• 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 console.
If you missed it, just check the logs:

docker logs YOUR-CONTAINER-NAME

Look for a line that says: Login to the dashboard at http://0.0.0.0:18888/login?t=YOUR_TOKEN_HERE

Why use the standalone Dashboard?

• Instant Setup: Works out of the box. Set your OpenTelemetry exporter to http://localhost:4317 to start immediately.
• Polyglot: It uses standard OTLP, so it works with any app, not just .NET. Making it easy and flexible for varied environments.
• Local-First: It's built for the "inner loop" of development. No extra infrastructure is needed.

Further reading

• Standalone Aspire dashboard