How long before a trace shows up in Span?
Last updated: October 27, 2026
Most coding-agent sessions appear in Span within about 2 hours, and within 4 hours at most. Evaluation scores follow about a day after a session ends, and Harness health picks up new sessions in its weekly run.
Why it matters
A trace that looks incomplete is usually still being processed. Knowing what fills in when tells you whether to wait or to check your setup.
How it works
The auspex agent on each developer machine records every event as it happens and uploads it in the background. The delay comes from Span's processing pipeline, which runs on a schedule. It assembles events into a trace, screens it, labels it, links it to pull requests and scores it.
Stage | 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 | On a later run, after the trace first appears |
Evaluation scores | About a day after the session ends, for sessions Span evaluates (see below) |
Harness health findings | Span re-analyzes repos once a week. The page refreshes hourly between runs. |
Screening comes first. A new trace stays hidden from everyone, its author included, until Span's screening step has run on it. A trace that matches a screening category stays restricted after that: only its author can see its contents.
Why scores take a day. Span waits until 20 hours after a session's last event before it scores the session, in case the developer picks the session back up. The scoring job then runs every 3 hours. Span scores each session once.
Which sessions Span evaluates. Span scores a session only when all of these are true:
Span linked it to a pull request, or classified it as feature implementation.
It has at least one tool call or at least two prompts.
It has 1,250 events or fewer. Very large sessions aren't scored.
It does not match a screening category. Screened contents never reach evaluations, coaching or Harness health.
Hover over a trace's score to see why it has none yet. Pending means it is queued or waiting for a linked pull request. Not evaluated means Span will not score it, for example because it has too little activity, is too large, falls outside your retention window, or no pull request was linked within 30 days.
If a trace is missing
Was the machine offline? auspex keeps events on the machine and delivers them when it reconnects, so a session worked on a plane appears after you are back online. Local storage holds up to about 7 days of activity.
Are agent traces on for your organization? Installing auspex is not enough on its own. Span turns agent traces on per organization. If you have just installed auspex and nothing has ever appeared, ask your Span account team to turn it on.
Is trace collection paused? An admin can pause collection in Settings → Traces. Work done while collection is paused is never captured and cannot be recovered.
Is the agent healthy? Run
auspex statuson the machine. It reports whether capture is wired up and whether uploads are succeeding. Settings in the coding tool itself can still turn off capture whileauspex statuslooks healthy, such as Claude Code remote settings that disable hooks.
If the agent is healthy, traces are on, and a session from yesterday is still missing, contact support.
Things to know
Untitled and unscored is normal at first: the title, task category and scores fill in on later runs. Nothing is lost and there is nothing to re-run.
Scores lag the trace by about a day: charts of evaluation scores for the last day or two fill in later.
Most sessions never get a score: sessions with no pull request link that aren't feature implementation, very short sessions, very large sessions and screened sessions are skipped. A later pull request link doesn't re-score a session that was already scored.
Screened traces still count in metadata metrics: prompt counts, cost and similar metrics include them. Their contents stay with the author.
Worked example: a developer ends a session at 3:00 PM on Tuesday, and Span links it to a pull request. The trace appears by about 5:00 PM, and by 7:00 PM at the latest. The 20-hour wait ends at 11:00 AM on Wednesday, and the next scoring run, at most 3 hours later, scores it by about 2:00 PM on Wednesday. The session feeds Harness health in the next weekly run. If the session had no pull request link and wasn't feature implementation, it would show Pending and wait up to 30 days for a link before showing Not evaluated.
Related articles
Understanding Agent Traces in Span (auspex)
Trace Screening: Automatically restrict personal or sensitive traces
Need help?
Contact your Span account team or reach out to support@span.app.