dashboard.ps1

(kind of) obsolete As of May 2026, Microsoft has merged the aspire dashboard with the aspire.cli nuget package, which is packaged as a dotnet tool (that took way longer than necessary ;) ).

You can run it using dnx: dnx -y aspire.cli dashboard run.

Note: The aspire.cli nuget is way larger (at least twice the size, >100 MiB) than the dashboard itself. The aspire.dashboard.sdk.rid nugets will be obsoleted in the future.

Note: the dashboard can still be used without aspire. It can collect and surface OTel (logs, traces, metrics) from any app - no dependency on .NET or aspire.

dashboard.ps1 script

TLDR This script runs the aspire dashboard locally directly from its NuGet package.

TLDR-2 Created this before dnx existed. AFAIK, dnx doesn't execute the dashboard as the dashboard NuGet is not packaged as a dotnet tool.

The aspire dashboard is probably the easiest way to surface OpenTelemetry data (logs, traces, metrics) in dev environments. It is published as a docker image. When you run an aspire orchestration locally, the dashboard is not run via docker but executed directly from a nuget package which contains the dashboard executable (on x64 Windows: Aspire.Dashboard.Sdk.win-x64). These packages are published per runtime identifier (the x64 Windows aspire dashboard is a separate nuget from the arm64 OSX package).

An additional advantage of using the nuget over the docker image is that the docker image is usually published later than the nuget (in case of the current version 9.1.0, the docker image was published weeks later).

This script runs the current (published) version of the aspire dashboard. The dashboard lives in the nuget package Aspire.Dashboard.Sdk.<rid>. rid is the runtime identifier of the form win-x64, osx-arm64 ...

Script

• retrieves the local rid
• retrieves the most recent version number of this nuget package
• checks the local system nuget package folder if that nuget package and the version exists. If it exists, it will execute the dashboard from the tools directory of this nuget package. Script does honor NUGET_PACKAGES environment variable (it does not check for NuGet.config).
• if the package is not found, it donwloads and extracts the nuget to a local folder relative to the script (package is not installed in the system wide nuget packages folder).
• sets environment variables for the dashboard:

  $env:ASPNETCORE_URLS = "http://+:18889"
  $env:DOTNET_DASHBOARD_OTLP_ENDPOINT_URL = "http://+:4317"
  $env:DOTNET_DASHBOARD_OTLP_HTTP_ENDPOINT_URL = "http://+:18888"
  $env:DOTNET_DASHBOARD_UNSECURED_ALLOW_ANONYMOUS = "True"