Dev Console overview

The Dev Console is the browser UI for building and inspecting an ADK agent. It opens during adk dev, and you can also open it with adk dashboard or by running adk interactively.

The console has two independent ideas:

Idea	Values	What it decides
Console mode	Local or Cloud	Where the console is pointed and which actions are available
Target	dev or prod	Which bot’s Cloud state the console shows or changes

Local mode

Local mode is attached to a project running with adk dev. Your agent code runs locally, while conversations, integrations, config, tables, knowledge, and other bot state still live on the selected Cloud bot.

In Local mode, you can switch between the dev and prod targets:

Use dev for everyday local development. Switch to prod when you need to inspect production bot state from the same local project context.

Cloud mode

Cloud mode opens against a deployed production bot without a local project backend. It is always prod, and actions that require local source context are unavailable.

Cloud mode relies on metadata published by adk deploy, so an ADK bot must be deployed at least once before the console can show its source-shaped definitions, such as actions, workflows, triggers, tables, knowledge, and config variables.

Console areas

This is a high-level map of the Dev Console’s top-level areas. Some items are only available in Local mode or can be hidden by feature flags.

Area	Use it for	Related docs
Agent Map	Visualize how actions, workflows, triggers, and conversations connect	Agent Map
Chat	Test conversations and inspect agent steps during each turn	Set up conversations, Agent steps
Actions	Inspect actions exposed by your agent	Create actions
Workflows	Inspect workflows and workflow runs	Create workflows, Use workflow steps
Triggers	Inspect trigger definitions and connected events	Set up triggers
Webchat Components	Preview custom UI components used in Webchat	Use custom components
RAG Search	Test knowledge retrieval against your bot’s knowledge bases	Knowledge bases
Evals	Run and inspect automated conversation tests	Write and run evals
Knowledge	Inspect knowledge bases connected to the selected bot	Knowledge bases
Tables	Inspect structured data connected to the selected bot	Tables
Files	Inspect files available to the selected bot	Knowledge bases
Conversations	Inspect conversation history	Manage conversation lifecycle
Analytics	Review aggregate behavior such as volume, latency, token usage, and cost	Analytics
Traces	Debug handlers, tool calls, LLM calls, and runtime spans	Debug with logs and traces
Logs	Read runtime log output	Debug with logs and traces
Agent Config	View and update configuration values	Configuration
Integrations	Manage integrations and plugins	Managing dependencies

Cloud mode is more limited because there is no local project backend. Use Local mode when you need source-aware actions or live local runtime data.