Verify that auspex is sending traces

Last updated: October 27, 2026

After you install auspex, the Span agent, use these checks to confirm it is healthy, linked to the right person, and sending traces to Span, and to find out why a trace hasn't appeared.

Why it matters

A device can look installed and still send nothing: the token may be wrong, the work email may not match anyone in Span, or a tool setting may block capture. Checking a few pilot machines before a full rollout, or after moving from Span coding-hooks to auspex, catches these problems early.

For IT admins: confirm a rollout worked before pushing to the whole fleet.
For engineers: confirm your own sessions are reaching Span.

How it works

auspex writes each event as it happens and uploads it in the background. Span's pipeline then assembles events into traces on a schedule, so a trace appears in Span a few hours after the session, not instantly.

What	When it appears
The trace itself: prompts, tool calls, files edited, tokens, cost	About 2 hours after the session, 4 hours at most
Title and task category	About 4 hours after the last message in the session
Evaluation scores	About a day after the session ends, for sessions that qualify for scoring

A trace stays hidden until Span has screened it, and a session appears only once it has at least one prompt and one agent response.

How to verify

Check the agent on the device. Run auspex status. It should report the background process (the daemon) running and the install mode: install mode: managed for an MDM install, install mode: user for a self-install. If you get auspex: command not found, open a new terminal or follow your install guide's troubleshooting section.
Check the identity. Run auspex auth show. It should show a masked token and the engineer's work email. That email must match the email on the engineer's Span profile, or their sessions won't appear under their name.
Run a session in a supported tool. Use Claude Code, Cursor, Codex CLI, GitHub Copilot CLI, or VS Code Copilot Chat to send at least one prompt and get a response.
Look for the trace in Span. After about 2 hours, open AI Effectiveness → Traces. Viewing your own traces requires the Agent Trace Data permission for yourself; see Agent Trace permissions.
Ask Span to confirm, if needed. Each device sends Span a health heartbeat that carries no captured content. Contact Span support with the engineer's work email, and we can confirm whether that device is reporting and whether sessions are arriving for that person.

Troubleshooting

Nothing has ever appeared for anyone, and Span shows "Trace processing is not enabled". Installing auspex isn't enough; Span turns on trace processing per organization. Ask your Span account team to enable it.
The engineer gets an access error (403) on the Traces page. Their permission group doesn't include Agent Trace Data, even for themselves. See Agent Trace permissions.
auspex auth show reports token: not set. The identity wasn't provisioned. On an MDM install, check that your MDM delivered the token with the package. On a self-install, rerun the install with the token in the same terminal window. If a Mac shows install mode: managed but has no MDM, the MDM package was installed by hand; see Self-Install auspex on macOS.
The token is rejected. Use your organization's traces token from Settings → Traces (the View token button), not a personal access token. Span admins and people who can manage integrations can open that page.
The work email is wrong or doesn't match Span. Sessions from that device count in organization totals but appear under no one's name. Reinstall with the engineer's work email, or ask your Span admin to check the email on the engineer's Span profile.
Other tools report, but Claude Code sessions are missing. Claude Code remote settings or hook restrictions can block capture while auspex status still looks healthy. See Claude Code remote settings (macOS) or (Windows).
Codex sessions are missing on a self-installed device. Codex asks you to trust new hooks once. Run /hooks in Codex and trust auspex. Managed installs skip this step.
Privacy mode is on. Run auspex privacy to check. While privacy mode is on, auspex captures, stores, and sends nothing from AI coding sessions on that machine. Only the health heartbeat continues, so the device still looks healthy. If the engineer turned privacy mode on, auspex privacy off resumes capture. If your organization has turned on privacy mode for every device, auspex privacy reports privacy mode: on (enforced by your organization — you cannot turn this off), and the engineer can't turn it off. To release it, contact your Span account team. See auspex: Default redaction, custom patterns, and privacy mode.
The engineer works in an unsupported tool. Chat in the Claude desktop app and other tools outside the five supported ones don't produce traces.
The machine was offline. auspex keeps events on disk while the machine is offline and uploads them when it reconnects, so offline sessions appear later; only if a long outage fills auspex's local storage limit are the oldest events dropped.
Moving from Span coding-hooks on Windows. Follow Retiring Span coding-hooks on Windows, which lists the checks to run before you remove coding-hooks.

Things to know

Untitled and unscored at first is normal. A trace's title, task category, and scores fill in on later runs. Nothing is lost and there is nothing to rerun.
Worked example. An engineer finishes a Cursor session at 10:00 AM. The trace appears by about 12:00 PM, and no later than 2:00 PM. Its title and task category arrive around 2:00 PM. If the session is linked to a PR or classified as feature implementation, its evaluation scores arrive the next morning, between about 6:00 AM and 9:00 AM.
Not every session is scored. Span scores sessions linked to a PR or classified as feature implementation, with at least 1 tool call or 2 prompts.
A healthy status isn't proof of capture. auspex status checks the agent, not every tool's settings. Confirm with a real session in Span during a pilot.

Need help?

Contact your Span account team or reach out to support@span.app.