---
title: An Agent Isn't Recalling Memory Correctly
summary: The dashboard reports "No recall" or "Reduced recall" for a workspace: what that means, and why the agent didn't simply fail instead.
date: 2026-09-10
---

# An Agent Isn't Recalling Memory Correctly

The dashboard reports "No recall" or "Reduced recall" for a workspace: what that means, and why the agent didn't simply fail instead.

## Why the agent kept responding normally

A memory recall problem never fails a run. The agent simply answers as though it remembers nothing for that workspace, rather than erroring out. That's deliberate: a memory outage shouldn't take an agent offline entirely, but it does mean a conversation can look ordinary while quietly missing context it should have had.

## "No recall" vs. "Reduced recall"

Both appear on the platform's own **Settings → System** dashboard, under Memory Recall, naming exactly which workspaces are affected:

- **No recall**: memory lookups for that workspace are failing outright.
- **Reduced recall**: lookups are working but degraded, most often when semantic (vector) search is unavailable and the platform has fallen back to text-only matching.

## What to check

1. **Embedding provider**: if vector search dropped to text-only, the embedding provider connected under **Settings → Embedding** is the most likely cause. Check its connection status and re-verify the key; see [Embedding Provider](/en/docs/guides/embedding-guide) for what each provider needs.
2. **Ollama, if that's your embedding provider**: a local Ollama instance that's stopped or unreachable produces exactly this symptom. Confirm it's running and reachable from this instance.
3. **Database health**: check **Settings → System → Storage Health**. Recall depends on the same database everything else does; a storage or connectivity problem there shows up here too.

## Related

- [Memory](/en/docs/features/memory): the three memory types and how recall normally works
- [Embedding Provider](/en/docs/guides/embedding-guide): connecting or fixing the provider that powers vector search
- [Team and Enterprise Settings](/en/docs/guides/admin-settings): where organization-wide health signals like this one live