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Important: This documentation is about an older version. It's relevant only to the release noted, many of the features and functions have been updated or replaced. Please view the current version.

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Assess dashboard usage

Usage insights enables you to have a better understanding of how your Grafana instance is used.

Note: Available in Grafana Enterprise and Grafana Cloud Pro and Advanced. Grafana Cloud insights logs include additional fields with their own dashboards. Read more in the Grafana Cloud documentation.

The usage insights feature collects a number of aggregated data and stores them in the database:

  • Dashboard views (aggregated and per user)
  • Data source errors
  • Data source queries

The aggregated data provides you access to several features:

This feature also generates detailed logs that can be exported to Loki. Refer to Export logs of usage insights.

Dashboard and data source insights

For every dashboard and data source, you can access usage information.

Dashboard insights

Note: Available in Grafana Enterprise version 7.0 and later, and Grafana Cloud Pro and Advanced.

To see dashboard usage information, click Dashboard insights in the top bar.

Dashboard insights show the following information:

  • Stats: The number of daily queries and errors for the past 30 days.
  • Users & activity: The daily view count for the last 30 days; last activities on the dashboard and recent users (with a limit of 20).

Data source insights

Note: Available in Grafana Enterprise version 7.3 and later, and Grafana Cloud Pro and Advanced.

Data source insights provides information about how a data source has been used in the past 30 days, such as:

  • Queries per day
  • Errors per day
  • Query load time per day (averaged in ms)

To find data source insights:

  1. Go to the Data source list view.
  2. Click on a data source.
  3. Click the Insights tab.

Presence indicator

Note: Available in Grafana Enterprise version 7.0 and later, and Grafana Cloud Pro and Advanced.

When you are signed in and looking at a dashboard, you can know who is looking at the same dashboard as you are via a presence indicator, which displays avatars of users who have recently interacted with the dashboard. The default timeframe is 10 minutes. To see the user’s name, hover over the user’s avatar. The avatars come from Gravatar based on the user’s email.

When there are more active users on a dashboard than can fit within the presence indicator, click the +X icon. Doing so opens dashboard insights, which contains more details about recent user activity.

To change recent to something other than the past 10 minutes, edit the configuration file:

ini 
[analytics.views]
# Set age for recent active users
recent_users_age = 10m

Sort dashboards by using insights data

Note: Available in Grafana Enterprise version 7.0 and later, and Grafana Cloud Pro and Advanced.

In the search view, you can use insights data to help you find most-used, broken, and unused dashbaords.

You can sort the dashboards by:

  • Errors total
  • Errors 30 days
  • Views total
  • Views 30 days

Visualize usage insights data

Note: Available in Grafana Enterprise version 7.0 and later, and Grafana Cloud Pro and Advanced.

If you set up your installation to export logs of usage insights, we’ve created two dashboards to help you take advantage of this data.

  1. Usage Insights overview provides a top-level perspective of user activity.
  2. Data source details dashboard provides a view of data source activity and health.

You can click the previous links to download the respective dashboard JSON, then import into your Grafana installation.