Agents Observe: Real-time Dashboard for Monitoring Claude Code Agent Teams

What Agents Observe Does

Agents Observe is a real-time observability dashboard specifically built for Claude Code agent teams. It addresses the visibility gap when Claude Code runs autonomously—spawning subagents, calling tools, reading files, and executing commands—by capturing every hook event as it happens and streaming it to a live dashboard.

Key Features and Architecture

The tool uses Claude Code hooks instead of OTEL (OpenTelemetry) to capture what the developer describes as "the full picture of agent actions." The architecture follows this flow:

• Claude Code Hooks → observe_cli.mjs → API Server (SQLite) → React Dashboard
• The hook script reads raw events from stdin, adds the project name, and POSTs them to the server
• The server parses events, stores agent metadata (name, type, parentage), and forwards events to WebSocket clients
• The React dashboard derives all agent state from the event stream

With the dashboard, you can:

• Watch tool calls stream in as they happen (PreToolUse → PostToolUse with results)
• See the full agent hierarchy—which subagent was spawned by which parent
• Filter by agent, tool type, or search across all events
• Expand any event to see the full payload, command, and result
• Click timeline icons to jump to specific events in the stream
• Browse historical sessions with human-readable names (e.g., "twinkly-hugging-dragon")

Installation and Setup

Prerequisites:

• Docker (required—the server runs as a container)
• Node.js (required—hook scripts run via node)

Plugin installation steps:

claude plugin marketplace add simple10/agents-observe
claude plugin install agents-observe

After restarting Claude Code, the server auto-starts as a Docker container on your next session, and hooks begin capturing events. The dashboard is available at http://localhost:4981.

Plugin Skills

• /observe — Open the dashboard URL and check if the server is running
• /observe status — Check server health and show dashboard URL

Performance Insights from Development

The developer shared several technical learnings from building and using the tool:

• Claude Code hooks are blocking—performance degrades rapidly with many plugins that use hooks
• Hooks provide more useful information than OTEL data
• Claude's jsonl files provide the full picture
• Lifecycle management of MCP processes started by plugins is "a bit kludgy at best"
• Switching to background (fire and forget) hooks and removing other plugins significantly improved Claude performance

The developer implemented a process management solution where the server tracks active connections and auto-shuts down when not in use, then the plugin spins it back up when a new session starts. This Docker-based approach is noted as a pattern that could improve security by isolating services.