Usage data on our own dashboards said most panels were viewed once and never again. So we built a feature to tell you that about yours, too.

We looked at view analytics for the default "golden signals" dashboard we ship every new workspace. Six of its eleven panels had a median of zero views per month across every customer who kept them. We'd been shipping clutter and calling it a starter template.

Dashboard rot is a universal problem, not just ours

Talking to customers, the pattern repeated everywhere: dashboards get built for a launch or an incident, get useful for a few weeks, and then quietly stop being maintained while nobody notices because nobody's looking at them anyway — until the panel breaks during the next incident and someone discovers it's been broken for four months.

Panel-level usage analytics

Every dashboard now tracks views per panel, and a new dashboard_health report flags panels with zero views in 30 days or a query returning an error for more than 24 hours:

from dashboard_usage
| where views_30d == 0 or last_error_age > 24h
| project dashboard, panel, views_30d, last_error_age
| order by last_error_age desc

What we shipped instead of a bigger default dashboard

Rather than curate a better static template, we shipped a "suggested panel" feature that recommends panels based on what similar workspaces actually keep and view long-term, and we cut our own default dashboard from eleven panels to five. Fewer, load-bearing panels beat a comprehensive one nobody trims.

Making the analytics visible, not just internal

We debated keeping view analytics as an internal tool we'd use to improve our own defaults, and decided against it — the same blind spot that let our starter dashboard rot for months exists inside every customer's workspace too. Panel-level usage is now visible to any editor on a dashboard directly in the UI, with a small badge on panels nobody has opened recently, so the person most likely to notice a dead panel is the one already looking at it.

The uncomfortable part of the data

Rolling this out also meant being honest with our own sales team, whose demo environment turned out to have the worst panel-utilization numbers we found anywhere in the company — a dashboard built to look impressive in a pitch, not to be lived in day to day. We rebuilt it down to the same five load-bearing panels as the default, and a few sales engineers pushed back initially, worried it would look thinner in a demo. Prospects who saw the trimmed version consistently asked fewer confused questions about what they were looking at.

  • Panel-level view analytics on every dashboard
  • dashboard_health report flags unused or broken panels
  • Default starter dashboard cut from eleven panels to five
  • Suggested panels based on what similar workspaces actually retain