Cargo Diagnostics

Diagnose and explain Cargo workflow behavior after the fact — trace why a single run produced the wrong output, sweep a batch or play for errors and group them by root cause, and profile where a play's credits go and how to cut the cost. Use when a run failed or "succeeded but looks wrong", a batch has errors, records are missing downstream values, or a play costs more than expected.

Cargo CLI — Diagnostics

Forensic runbooks for workflow behavior: trace one run, sweep a batch for errors, profile a play's credit spend. This skill is the interpretation layer — the raw surfaces (run get, orchestration SQL, billing metrics) are documented in cargo-orchestration and cargo-billing; each runbook here tells you which of them to pull, in what order, and what each output shape means.

Which runbook?

text

What are you diagnosing?
│
├── One run / one record ("why did this record fail?",
│   "run succeeded but the output is wrong/empty")
│   └── references/run-trace.md
│
├── Many runs ("the batch has errors", "error rate spiked",
│   "which node keeps failing?")
│   └── references/batch-error-sweep.md
│
└── Cost ("this play is expensive", "where do the credits go?",
    "make this cheaper")
    └── references/play-optimize-credits.md

Rule of thumb: start with the sweep when you don't yet know which run to look at — it ends by handing you exemplar run UUIDs to feed into the trace.

Boundary with cargo-analytics: analytics measures and exports ("what's the error rate?", "download the batch results", "export this segment"); this skill explains ("why is the error rate up?", "why is this record's output empty?"). A diagnosis often starts from an analytics signal (error count spiked, batch reports failedRunsCount > 0) and ends back in analytics — once the cause is fixed and runs re-executed, bulk retrieval goes through run download-outputs / batch download / segment download, all documented in ../cargo-analytics/SKILL.md. This skill's evidence surfaces (run get, orchestration SQL, billing metrics) are for diagnosis, not bulk export.

References

Doc	What it covers
references/run-trace.md	Walk one run end-to-end: per-node executions, runContext outputs, branch routing, per-node credits and timing.
references/batch-error-sweep.md	Find errored runs across a batch/play/workspace, group failures by root cause, pick exemplars, decide fix vs report.
references/play-optimize-credits.md	Attribute credit spend to workflows and nodes, then apply the cost levers in priority order.

Prerequisites

See ../cargo/references/prerequisites.md for install, login (--oauth / --token), JSON output conventions, and error shapes. Verify the session with cargo-ai whoami before running any of the commands below.

Credit attribution steps (billing usage get-metrics, billing subscription get) need a token with admin access; everything else works with a standard token.

The three surfaces every runbook draws on

Surface	Command	Gives you
Run detail	cargo-ai orchestration run get <run-uuid>	run.executions[] (node-by-node trace), runContext (per-node output keyed by nodeSlug), runComputedConfigs (what each node was actually called with)
Orchestration SQL	cargo-ai orchestration query execute "<sql>"	Aggregates over runs, batches, spans, records (ClickHouse; no schema prefix; workspace-scoped)
Billing metrics	cargo-ai billing usage get-metrics --from <date> --to <date>	Credit totals, filterable and groupable by workflow_uuid, connector_uuid, agent_uuid, integration_slug, model_uuid

Full query syntax, table columns, and caps: ../cargo-orchestration/references/examples/queries.md. Debugging field semantics: ../cargo-orchestration/references/troubleshooting.md.

Presenting findings

Follow ../cargo/references/interaction.md: lead with the conclusion ("18 of 20 failures are one cause: the connector's token expired"), summarize evidence in a short table, never dump raw run get JSON or full query results into the conversation. Any fix that re-runs paid nodes goes through the pilot gate in ../cargo-gtm/references/cost-discipline.md.

When diagnosis dead-ends

If the evidence contradicts documented behavior (a field missing from run get, a query cap that doesn't match the docs, an error that makes no sense), file a report — that's the official channel and the team reads every one:

bash

cargo-ai workspaceManagement report create \
  --title "<one-line summary>" \
  --description "<commands run, errorMessage verbatim, expected vs actual, UUIDs>"