Usage Reports

Usage Reports shows who uses what in your workspace: which screens, dashboards, apps and notebooks members open, how many members come back, and where they go next. Use it to see what your members adopt, which dashboards and apps earn their keep, and where people drop out of a process.

Open it from Usage reports under Insights in the rail of the Identity tab. It opens as a page inside Identity, beside the rail, rather than in a separate window.

Who Can See It

Usage Reports needs the same permission as the Security Log: identity.security_log.read. Without it the rail item isn’t shown, and a member who opens the report anyway sees a notice that they don’t have access.

The reports show usage per member in these places: the Members tab, the lists of members you open from Content and Overview, and the Daily activity by member and First use exports, which include member ids. Everything else is counted across members. Grant the permission only to people who should see individual activity.

What Is Counted

Usage Reports combines five areas. Choose one from Area, or leave it on All areas.

Area	What is recorded
PlaidCloud app	The screens members open and the actions they take in the app.
Dashboards	Dashboard and chart views.
Apps	App visits and the time members spend in each app.
Notebook servers	Time members spend in notebook server sessions.
Notebooks	The notebooks members open and save.

Notebook servers and notebooks are separate areas, so you can choose either one. Apps are a single area. Notebook events are recorded only for notebooks that run on the default notebook image. A custom image doesn’t report them.

Note

Every day in the reports is a UTC day. A member working late in the evening in the Americas can appear on the next day.

Read the Reports

The bar at the top of the page holds the filters. Each tab loads when you first open it and again when you change a filter.

Filter	What it does
Area	Limits the report to one area. It is hidden on Funnel, which picks an area for each step, and Exports, which has its own choice.
Group	Limits the report to the members of one security group. See Narrow to a Group.
Date range	Last 7 days, Last 30 days, Last 90 days, Last 180 days, This month, Previous month, or Custom… for a start and end date of up to 180 days.
Refresh	Loads the figures again (F5). Updated shows when they were last loaded.

The date range is shared by every tab, and the tab you were on and the range you chose are saved with your account settings, so the page reopens where you left it on any computer. Changing the range reloads the tab you are on and the other tabs when you open them. Each tab has its own explanations: point at a heading or number to read what it means.

While a tab loads you see a placeholder instead of a blank page. If a report can’t load, the tab shows the reason with Try again and Copy details. When a range has no activity, the tab suggests a longer range to try. To open a row, double-click it or select it and press Enter. Back returns from the item you opened to the list.

Overview

The headline numbers for the range, each with an arrow and a percentage showing the change from the previous period of the same length:

Number	Meaning
Active members	Members with any activity.
New members	Members seen for the first time in the range. Shown as a dash when the range starts before collection began, because earlier first uses can’t be told.
Returning members	Active members who were first seen before the range.
Activity minutes	Estimated: five minutes for each five-minute period with any action or view.
App open minutes	Time apps and notebook servers were open, idle time included. Counted apart from activity minutes.
Events	Everything recorded.

Events that can’t be tied to a member are counted separately, in a line under the numbers. They count as events, not as members.

Highlights lists up to four things worth a look, each a link to where you can see more:

• A rise or fall of 10% or more in active members compared with the previous period.
• The number of members not active in the range. Select it to open the list of inactive members.
• The number of dashboards and apps nobody opened. Select it to open Content with the unused ones first.
• The most used item, when at least five members used it.

A highlight only appears when it has something to say. When PlaidCloud can’t work out a count, the highlight is hidden instead of showing 0, and if nothing stands out you see No notable changes in this range.

Most used lists each screen, dashboard, chart or item with its area, event, number of members, and Reach, the share of active members who used it in the range. The column chooser adds Events and Events not linked to a member. By month (all history) shows active members, average daily members and Stickiness for each month, with a note when the month is still running or only partly covered. Stickiness is the average daily active members divided by the active members in the month, so a higher value means people come back on more days.

Activity

Active members by Daily, Weekly or Monthly period, plus Retention by first week: for each week members first appeared, the Cohort size and the share of those members still active in each week after. A period marked with an asterisk isn’t all inside the range.

Paths

The most taken moves between screens, as Moved from, Moved to and Times taken, across areas. Paths cover the last 30 days at most.

Members

Show switches between two lists:

• Active has one row per member seen in the range: name, username, active days, events, activity minutes, app open minutes, and when they were first and last seen. Open a row to see that member’s events per day and what they used.
• Inactive lists current members with no activity in the range, with when they became a member and when they were last seen. None recorded means no activity in the history kept, which is 25 months at most and only since collection began. Download the list with Download CSV. Inactive means no activity in any area, so it ignores Area. A member removed from the workspace or deactivated isn’t listed or counted.

Content

Every dashboard, app and notebook with its Type, Members, Reach, Opens, App open minutes (apps only), a weekly Trend and when it was Last used. Choose a Type to narrow the list, or select Hide unused to leave out items nobody opened. Open a row to see the members who used the item, and download either list with Download CSV. A note under the list says which types aren’t collected yet or were only collected since a later date.

Narrow to a Group

Group limits Overview, Content and the Inactive list to the members of one security group. Choose Everyone to remove the limit. Type in the box to search the workspace’s groups. The report uses the group’s membership today, not when the activity happened, and says so beside the filter.

• Active members, Activity, Paths and Exports aren’t narrowed. The filter is disabled on those tabs and says why.
• By month isn’t shown for a group, because monthly history is kept for everyone.
• A group with no members, or one that no longer exists, returns empty results and a warning that says so, not an error.
• If you can’t read the workspace’s security groups, the filter isn’t offered.

Exports

Download a summary as a CSV. Choose the Summary and a Date range, then select Download CSV. The range is up to 25 months.

Summary	Contents
Daily activity	Members and events for each day, area, event and subject.
Daily activity by member	The same for each member, with member ids.
Monthly adoption	Members and events for each month, area, event and subject.
Monthly active members	Active members for each month and area.
First use	When each member first used each area, with member ids.

The export uses the area you chose above the tabs. A large summary downloads in batches of up to 50,000 rows, and the page combines them into one file. If the file would be larger than the page builds, it saves what it has and tells you the file is incomplete: choose a shorter range to get the rest.

Every export writes an entry to the Security Log recording who exported which summary, the range, and the number of rows. A summary that spans several batches writes an entry for each batch.

To put these figures in a table on a schedule instead, use the Get Workspace Usage step.

Caution

The monthly summaries include a total row for each event, with the subject *. That row is the distinct members and events across all of the event’s subjects. Don’t add it to the subject rows or you will count everything twice.

Funnel

See how many members go through a sequence of steps. A step is an event from one of the areas, for a particular subject, or Any subject. The funnel uses the date range you chose, up to the last 90 days, and says so when it shortens a longer range.

1. Select Add step and choose the area, event, and subject for each step. A funnel has 2 to 6 steps.
2. Choose Time allowed between steps: 1, 6, 24, 72, or 168 hours.
3. Select Run funnel.

The result shows, for each step, how many members reached it, the share of those who started, and the median time from the previous step. Each step but the last shows how many members stopped there. The last step shows how many completed the funnel. Steps can mix areas, so you can follow a member from a PlaidCloud screen to a dashboard. Recent funnels reopens a funnel you ran before. A step list only offers events recorded in the range.

Unattributed Usage

Some events can’t be tied to a PlaidCloud member. They count in Events and in Unattributed events, but never in member counts. The main cases:

• A Superset account created inside Superset instead of through PlaidCloud.
• A view of an embedded dashboard, which has no Superset user.
• App and notebook server activity the platform logs can’t tie to a member. Their attribution comes from those logs, so treat it as best-effort.

A large unattributed share on an area means its member counts are understated.

When History Starts

History begins when usage collection is turned on for your workspace, and a day or month before then shows no activity. The first month with data is marked as partial.

Panel and JupyterHub are read from platform logs, which are kept for about 90 days. When collection starts, those two areas fill in at most that much earlier history. Superset fills in from its own logs, up to 180 days. Only the PlaidCloud app starts from nothing when collection starts.

Usage Reports keeps raw events for 180 days, which is why the longest range is 180 days, and keeps monthly summaries for 25 months. When a member is removed outside PlaidCloud, for example through SCIM or Keycloak, their raw usage ages out after 180 days and their first-use record after 25 months.

Erase a Member’s Usage

A workspace administrator (or super user) with the identity.security_log.read permission can erase one member’s usage and stop collecting it, then lift the erasure later. Both erase and restore require that permission and that role. These two actions are available through the REST API only.

Action	Request
Erase	DELETE /rest/v1/identity/usage/users/{user_id}
Restore	DELETE /rest/v1/identity/usage/users/{user_id}/erasure

Erasing removes the member’s events and first-use record, and from that moment the reports and exports leave the member out. Their usage isn’t collected again, and history that is read in later from Panel and JupyterHub logs is dropped too. If the removal can’t finish at once, the response says so and the next hourly maintenance run completes it.

Restoring lifts the erasure so new activity is collected again. It doesn’t bring back what was erased.

Both actions write an entry to the Security Log.

Related

• Identity and Access Management
• Managing Security Groups