Concepts

Once traces start arriving, four more nouns describe what you see in the dashboard. They build on the software development kit (SDK) vocabulary in SDK concepts: a trace is still the unit you send, and everything below describes what Lemma does with traces after ingest.

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Project

A project is the top-level container for traces, issues, artifacts, and settings from your agent or agents. Each project has its own dashboard, API key, and project ID. Use separate projects to isolate environments (dev, staging, prod) or distinct products.

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Agent

An agent isn’t something you register. It’s a name that appears on a trace, and Lemma uses that name to scope Artifacts, Analytics scorecards, and issue grouping to the right agent. A trace with no usable agent name still ingests, but nothing agent-scoped has anywhere to attach it.

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Trace

A trace is one ready agent execution: the conversation, the execution tree of spans, and any errors it produced. Traces are what you search and open on the Traces page, and they’re the raw evidence behind every issue.

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Issue

An issue is a durable grouped failure pattern inferred from trace evidence. Say the issue was observed in a trace. Statuses are open, in progress, resolved, and dismissed. Lemma analyzes a trace after its conversation goes quiet, or immediately if the trace has no thread ID, then groups repeated evidence so the same bug accumulates supporting traces instead of spawning a new issue every time it recurs. Opening an issue shows you the pattern. Opening a supporting trace shows you the specific run. See Issues for status, priority, and investigation. Detection and grouping are probabilistic. Treat an issue as a hypothesis backed by evidence, not a certainty, and open the supporting traces before you call it confirmed. Alerting follows this issue lifecycle; see Product boundaries.

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Artifact

Artifacts are agent-scoped. Provided context is text (or a supported text file) you supply about that agent. Generated artifacts are a versioned understanding document and a decision-flow diagram Lemma builds from traces plus that context. Agent names come from observed traces. Context for one named agent is not evidence about another. See Artifacts.

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Product boundaries

Lemma evaluates production usage from real users. It does not offer offline evaluation. If someone asks about “online eval,” they mean evaluating actual production usage. Standalone monitors, incidents, and a standalone metrics product are not current surfaces. Failure alerting follows the issue lifecycle via Slack and webhooks.

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