## What & why
This is the system behind the Dashboard Agent — an assistant that
answers questions about a project's runs, errors, queues, deploys and
health, and can investigate failures end to end.
The agent runs as a chat.agent task in its own Trigger project. It has
no access to the main database or ClickHouse; all platform data is read
through the public API using a delegated, read-only user token.
Everything here is behind `canAccessDashboardAgent` and inert with the
flag off. The UI that mounts the panel lands in #4529.
## Stack
`#4418` (this, base) ← `#4529` UI ← `#4525` Watch ← `#4516` storybook
gallery. The scenario/contract reference for the whole stack is
`internal-packages/dashboard-agent/GUIDEBOOK.md` (it lands on the Watch
branch): it states, per feature, what makes each thing happen and where
that is decided.
## What's inside
**Agent runtime and tools** — `internal-packages/dashboard-agent`:
prompt, tool set (API reads, TRQL query, docs, navigation,
evidence/investigations, repo source), conversation compaction, a
prompt-prefix token budget pinned by snapshot test, and sampled
LLM-judged turn evals. The package cannot import webapp server code,
which is what makes the "no DB access" claim structural rather than a
convention.
**Contracts** — `internal-packages/dashboard-agent-contracts`:
`trigger://` URIs, intents, and the block envelope every rendered card
travels in.
**Conversation store** — `internal-packages/dashboard-agent-db`: drizzle
over postgres-js in its own `trigger_dashboard_agent` Postgres schema,
plus one additive migration.
**Auth boundary** — the user-actor token gains an optional environment
claim; one guard (`userActorEnvironment.server.ts`) enforces it so
routes don't each re-derive the rule. Token minting, cap ceiling, and
the RBAC fallback path for self-hosted.
**Transport** — webapp resource routes that mint the token and proxy
each turn, and SDK-side mid-turn reconnect.
**Public API the agent reads through** — orgs, projects, environments,
runs, queue metrics, workers, a run's commit metadata, repo snapshot,
reports, and `POST /api/v1/query`.
**Reports** — the health report's layout is declared once and shared by
the card, the markdown surface and the JSON/MCP surface, so the same
report reads the same in the dashboard, the terminal and an editor.
**Block renderers** — the report and investigation cards the flows above
already emit (`app/components/dashboard-agent/`). The panel that hosts
them, and the rest of the chat UI, is #4529.
**Query safety and CSP** — see below.
## Key decisions
- **The agent is a separate Trigger project, not webapp code.** It reads
platform data over the public API with a delegated user-actor token
whose `cap` ceilings it to read scopes. No Prisma, no ClickHouse, no
webapp imports.
- **The PAT-only auth helper now refuses user-actor tokens.** This is an
intentional behavioral change: its callers consume only a bare userId
and do not enforce delegated-token capabilities. Actor-aware routes
continue through the scoped route builders instead.
- **RBAC fallback builds a delegated token's ability from its own cap**,
never the blanket ability a PAT gets (read-only when the token declares
none). Without this, the agent's read-only cap would buy a write JWT on
self-hosted.
- **Org creation checks RBAC only for user-actor tokens, and only after
the env gate**, so an install with `ORG_CREATION_API_ENABLED` off
returns 404 rather than 403, and an ordinary PAT never consults an
ability the route has no org to scope. Both orderings are pinned by
test.
- **The query path is read-only in depth.** TRQL rejects write
statements at the grammar level (they don't parse, rather than being
filtered), ClickHouse runs with `readonly=1`, and the org/project/env
filters are injected server-side from the credential — the request body
cannot widen scope. An unparseable query denies instead of falling
through to the permissive resource.
- **Document-wide img-src CSP.** Remote images are an
outbound-request/exfiltration surface, so the policy permits only
own-origin/data/blob, the required SSO avatar hosts, and the favicon
endpoint. Operators can add exact origins through CSP_IMG_SRC_ALLOWLIST;
wildcard hosts and bare schemes are intentionally not allowed.
- **The chat transport reconnects on a mid-turn EOF**
(`@trigger.dev/sdk`). A body that ends without a turn-complete is
terminal only when the server says `X-Session-Settled: true`; otherwise
the transport resubscribes from `lastEventId` with bounded backoff, and
any record re-earns the budget. Previously a closed long-poll window or
a proxy restart left the reply stuck as if still generating.
- **Conversations live in their own datastore**, schema-scoped and
foreign-key-free (it references `organizationId`/`userId` by id, because
in cloud it is a different database). It is a display read-model for the
History tab and transport resume; `chat.agent`'s object-store snapshot
remains the model's source of truth.
- **Deterministic first.** Reports and health checks contain no LLM —
they are computed from the same data the dashboard shows, and the model
only narrates and links them. That is what makes a number in an answer
auditable.
## Testing
- 63 new test files, run with `pnpm run test --filter webapp` and
per-package vitest. Heaviest coverage on the auth boundary
(`userActorPatOnlyBoundary`, `userActorTokenClaimsAndScopes`,
`contextlessPatRoutes`, `rbacFallbackBranch`), TRQL read-only, the
report layout, and the SDK reconnect.
- The agent package has a separate eval lane (`pnpm run test:evals`,
`vitest.eval.config.ts`) that hits the real model, so it never runs in
`pnpm test`.
- Live-tested against a local stack scenario by scenario; the GUIDEBOOK
lists the condition each behaviour is expected under, which is what
those runs were checked against.
## Changelog
`.server-changes/dashboard-agent.md`, plus changesets for
`@trigger.dev/core` (report schemas), `@trigger.dev/sdk` (chat
reconnect) and the CLI's `mint-token` help text.
Once this is merged, oxlint is at a pretty sensible baseline.
**Enable `no-unused-vars`, `typescript/consistent-type-imports`, and
`import/no-duplicates` lint rules**
Turns on three previously-disabled oxlint rules across the monorepo and
fixes all violations:
- **`no-unused-vars`** – enabled as an error with standard ignore
patterns: unused function arguments are ignored by default (`args:
"none"`), variables/caught errors/destructured array elements prefixed
with `_` are allowed, and rest siblings are permitted.
- **`typescript/consistent-type-imports`** – enforced as an error; all
type-only imports now use the `import type` syntax.
- **`import/no-duplicates`** – enforced as an error; duplicate import
statements from the same module have been merged.
The remaining commits clean up the violations found across the codebase:
removing unused variables/imports/type aliases, adding `_` prefixes to
intentionally unused bindings, fixing duplicate imports, and converting
value imports to `import type` where appropriate.
Summary
- Implemented metrics dashboards with a built-in dashboard and custom
dashboards
- Added a "Big number” display type
What changed
- New data format for metric layouts and saving/editing layouts
(editing, saving, cancel revert)
- QueryWidget usable on Query page and Metrics dashboards
- Time filtering, auto-reloading and timeBucket() auto-bin support
- Filters added to metrics; widget popover/improved history and blank
states
- Side menu:
- Metrics/Insights section with icons, colors, padding, collapsible
behavior and reordering of custom dashboards
- Move action logic into service for reuse and API querying; refactor
reordering for reuse
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---------
Co-authored-by: James Ritchie <james@trigger.dev>
Summary
- Improve query experience and safety across ClickHouse and TSQL.
Changes
- Display JSON columns when in non-pretty mode (no longer show [Object
Object]).
- Sanitize ClickHouse errors originating from TSQL.
- Remove tenant details from errors.
- Add AI-assisted error-fixing for queries.
- Improve code quality and readability.
- Provide autocomplete support for enum values.
- Enforce limits on ClickHouse queries (10s query limit).
- Add org-level and global concurrency limits.
- Warn and train AI to avoid SELECT *; when used, only return core
columns and show info.
- If AI suggests no time range, default to past 7 days.
- Format the default query for readability.
- Add an admin-only EXPLAIN button.
- Prevent impersonation queries from being saved to history.
TRQL (pronounced Treacle like the delicious British dark sweet syrup) is
the TRiggerQueryLanguage. It allows users to safely write queries on
their data. The queries are safely turned into ClickHouse queries which
are tenant-safe and not SQL injectable.
https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/bbfca473-b3fc-4150-8fe6-79e8840a2d29
This started out as a translation of HogQL by PostHog from Python to
TypeScript.
Features
- Tenant safe queries.
- Many underlying ClickHouse features including functions and
aggregations.
- Virtual columns, which are exposed to users as real columns but are
actually expressions.
- Transformations of data types and where clauses.
- Simple JSON path querying.
- Limits on execution time.
- Reporting of query statistics.
## Query page
There’s a new Query page (currently behind a feature flag) where you can
write TRQL queries and execute them against your environment, project or
organization.
Features
- Executing TRQL queries
- Syntax highlighting and errors
- Autocomplete
- AI generation/editing of queries
- Help and examples
- Table with auto-inferred data types from the table schema
- Table cell renderers for our special types like Run ids, environments,
machines, tasks, queues, etc.
- Copy/export as CSV/JSON
- Line and bar graphs with grouping and stacking
- History of queries
Katia Bulatova
