Debugging Multi-Agent Systems: Traces, Capture Mode, and Live Dashboards

Multi-agent systems are hard to debug. It's not the same as debugging a web request or a database query. You can't set a breakpoint in the middle of an LLM call. You can't predict what the model will say. When an agent produces bad output, you need to understand the full chain of events: what prompt was sent, what the model returned, which tools were called, what context from previous tasks was injected, and whether the output parsing succeeded. Traditional debuggers don't help here. You need purpose-built observability. This post covers the debugging and observability stack in AgentEnsemble: structured traces for post-mortem analysis, capture mode for recording full execution state, and the live dashboard for real-time visibility during development. The Debugging Challenge Consider a three-agent pipeline: Researcher, Analyst, Writer. The Writer produces a report that's factually wrong. Where did things go wrong? Did the Researcher find bad information? Did the Analyst misinterpret the