Troubleshoot the Aspire dashboard

This article helps you diagnose and resolve common issues with the Aspire dashboard.

Connection errors between the dashboard and AppHost

The dashboard displays resource information by connecting to a gRPC resource service hosted by the AppHost. When this connection fails, the dashboard may show an error message or display telemetry data without any resource list or console logs.

Symptoms

• The dashboard loads but shows no resources in the resource list.
• Console logs are unavailable for resources.
• An error banner appears indicating the dashboard can’t connect to the resource service.
• The dashboard log contains errors related to gRPC connection failures.

Viewing dashboard logs

Enable verbose logging to get more detail about connection failures. Run the AppHost with debug-level output:

Run with debug output

aspire run --log-level Debug

Review the console output for messages related to the resource service connection, such as gRPC status codes or TLS handshake failures.

Certificate and TLS errors

When running with HTTPS, the dashboard and AppHost use certificates to secure the gRPC connection. Certificate issues are a common source of connection failures.

Common causes:

• The development certificate isn’t trusted. Run aspire certs trust to trust the development certificate.
• The certificate has expired or is corrupted. Regenerate it with aspire certs clean followed by aspire certs trust.
• A custom certificate is specified but the file path or password is incorrect. Verify the Dashboard:ResourceServiceClient:ClientCertificate settings.

Firewall and network issues

• Confirm that a firewall or some other security software isn’t blocking the connection between the dashboard and the resource service endpoint.
• The resource service uses gRPC, which requires HTTP/2. Some firewalls, proxies, or network appliances don’t support HTTP/2 traffic and may silently drop or downgrade the connection. Ensure that any intermediary between the dashboard and the AppHost allows HTTP/2.

Ping timeout errors when debugging the AppHost

You may see the following error in the dashboard:

Status(StatusCode="Internal", Detail="Error starting gRPC call.
HttpRequestException: The HTTP/2 server didn't respond to a ping request
within the configured KeepAlivePingDelay. (HttpProtocolError)")

This means the dashboard’s gRPC client sent an HTTP/2 PING frame to the AppHost’s resource service, but didn’t receive a response in time.

The most likely cause is that a debugger is paused on the AppHost — when you hit a breakpoint, the process can’t respond to HTTP/2 PING frames, triggering the timeout. This error resolves once execution resumes.

If you see this error and you’re running without a debugger attached, verify the AppHost process is still alive and responsive.

For the full list of configuration options, see Aspire dashboard configuration.