---
title: "Check trace health"
description: "Find missing or malformed instrumentation, inspect affected traces, and verify a fix on new traffic."
sidebar:
  label: "Check trace health"
seo:
  title: "Check Trace Health | Judgment How-to"
  description: "Use project and per-trace health checks to investigate instrumentation failures and hand off evidence for a fix."
---

Trace Health checks whether recorded traces have the structure and data needed
for inspection and evaluation. It does not judge the quality of the agent's
answer. Start here when spans, messages, timing, or model metadata look
incomplete.

## Review the project's checks

From **Logs**, open the health checks in the toolbar and select **Trace health**.
You can also open **Trace health needs attention** on project home when it
appears. You need recorded traces in the selected project.

1. Check the dialog's time range; the toolbar summary starts with the past
   24 hours. Select the period relevant to your instrumentation change.
2. Expand **Failing checks**. Read the failure description, impact, and
   **Remediation** for the check you want to investigate.
3. Read the affected count and percentage **of applicable traces**. The
   denominator includes traces eligible for that check, not necessarily all
   project traffic. Use the information control to read its applicability.
4. Select **Review traces**, choose an affected trace, and inspect its tree
   and recorded data. Check several examples before assuming one cause
   explains every failure.

The Trace Health indicator inside an individual trace covers that trace only.
Open it to inspect failed, passed, and **Not applicable** checks; choose a
failure to focus the affected evidence. A missing or unavailable health result
does not prove the instrumentation passed.

## Fix the instrumentation and verify

Use the check's remediation to locate the recording problem. To work in your
editor, open the menu beside the coding-agent action in the project's Trace
Health dialog and select **Copy as prompt**, or open it in a coding agent.
Review the supplied trace evidence with the relevant
instrumentation code; copying or opening a prompt does not apply a fix.

After changing the instrumentation:

1. Send a new execution through the affected path.
2. Open that new trace and confirm the missing structure or data is present.
3. Check its health result once available, then inspect the project summary
   for a time range containing the new traffic.

Older malformed traces can remain in the selected window. A code fix does not
rewrite their recorded data. If there are no traces at all, first follow the
[instrumentation checks](/documentation/tracing/instrumentation#troubleshooting).
If the health panel fails to load, retry loading it before interpreting the
absence of results as healthy or unhealthy.

## Next step

For missing conversation messages, use the [conversation troubleshooting
table](/documentation/monitoring/trace-investigation#when-conversation-cannot-display-the-evidence).
Once the recording is sound, inspect [judge results](/documentation/monitoring/trace-investigation#3-inspect-judge-results)
to assess the agent's behavior.