Inspect sessions and track usage

Use the session viewer in the Claude Console to inspect what an agent did in a session, without writing any code. Use the session's usage totals to see what that work consumed.

Inspect a session in the Console

The session viewer is only accessible to Developers and Admins. To open it, go to the Console sidebar and select Sessions under Managed Agents. The list shows every session in the workspace with its status, agent, token usage, cost, and creation time. Select a session to open it.

The session viewer shows:

• Timeline minimap: A zoomable overview of the session's activity over time, with one lane per thread in multiagent sessions. Select a lane to view that thread, or select a mark to jump to its event.
• Transcript: The conversation grouped by model request, including thinking, tool calls with their inputs and results, and message text as it streams. You can filter the events and copy or download them as JSON.
• Inspector: A resizable side panel with details about the session, in five tabs.

Append ?event={event_id} to a session URL to open the session at a specific event.

With ant beta:sessions connect, you can open the same viewer from the ant CLI or follow the session in your terminal. See Connect to a Managed Agents session from your terminal.

Track usage

The session object includes a usage field with the session's cumulative usage: token counts, server tool use, active time, and the tracked list cost. Fetch the session after it goes idle to read the latest totals.

{
  "id": "sesn_01...",
  "status": "idle",
  "usage": {
    "input_tokens": 5000,
    "output_tokens": 3200,
    "cache_read_input_tokens": 20000,
    "cache_creation": {
      "ephemeral_5m_input_tokens": 2000,
      "ephemeral_1h_input_tokens": 0
    },
    "list_cost": {
      "amount": "187",
      "currency": "USD"
    },
    "active_seconds": 342.5,
    "server_tool_use": {
      "web_search_requests": 3,
      "web_fetch_requests": 0
    }
  }
}

Cache entries use a 5-minute TTL by default, so back-to-back turns within that window benefit from cache reads, which reduce per-token cost.

The session's stats object has its own active_seconds, which sums each thread's own active time instead of counting overlapping activity once.

Per-thread usage

Each session thread's own usage carries list_cost and active_seconds too. Per-thread figures are rounded independently and exclude the session's running-time cost, so they don't sum exactly to the session's list_cost. The session figure is the authoritative one.

Read usage from the stream

You don't have to poll the session to observe these totals. The session.usage event carries the same cumulative snapshot on the session stream and in the event history. The snapshot holds the usage object plus the session's budget, which is null when the session has none.

The event is emitted on idle transitions rather than on a timer:

• The session emits one immediately before it goes idle, whatever the stop reason.
• The session emits one when a thread pauses at a session budget.

Enforce a spend limit

To enforce a spend limit, set a session budget rather than polling usage and stopping the session yourself. The platform prices the session's consumption continuously, and pauses each thread before its next model request once the list cost reaches the cap. See When a session reaches its budget for what that looks like on the stream.

Debugging tips

• Check session events: The session reports errors through session.error events.
• Review tool results: Tool execution failures often explain unexpected agent behavior. The Inspector's Tools tab shows each tool's failures.
• Use system prompts: Add logging instructions to the system prompt so the agent summarizes what it did and what it found.
• Troubleshoot previews: If a stream that opts in to event deltas doesn't behave as you expect, see Troubleshoot previews.

Next steps