Read your dashboard without fooling yourself

Your first dashboard will show large numbers. Some of them will be complete, some will describe a third of your work, and the difference is not visible unless you look for it.

This tutorial is the order in which to read the screen.

The first panel on the dashboard is What changed, and it is the only part of the page that has already done the ranking for you. It compares each headline metric with its own value in the window of the same length immediately before, and narrates the largest movements in sentences that name both the old value and the new one.

It is deliberately quiet. A metric appears there only when both periods were fully covered by sources that recorded it the same way — same adapter version, same normalization version, same quality, same calculation. If you re-imported a provider halfway through the current window, that metric is held out rather than reported as growth, and the panel says how many metrics it held out and why.

Two more rules worth knowing, because they are the two ways this kind of summary usually lies:

• A move of less than 5 percent is listed as held steady instead of being narrated. A summary that opens with "prompts rose 0.4%" trains you to ignore it.
• A metric that had nothing in the previous window is reported in words, with no percentage. Growth from zero is not a percentage, and ranking on one would put a single new agent launch above a doubling of your session count.

An empty What changed means the comparison could not be made honestly. It does not mean nothing happened.

The default range is a rolling 30 days, in your configured timezone. Day boundaries follow your configured first day of the week where the range is a calendar one.

Eight ranges are available: today, this week, rolling 7, 30, and 90 days, year to date, all time, and a custom range. Day boundaries are local midnights, not server midnights, so a late-night session lands on the day you think it did.

The range and every filter live in the URL. A view you can read is a view you can bookmark or send to yourself.

If the range excludes everything you have, the dashboard says so instead of telling you to import. It names how many sessions are on your account and offers a one-click switch to all time, and if a provider, project, or model filter is also narrowing the view it offers to clear those too — without guessing which of the two is responsible. This is the expected first screen straight after an import, because an export is a record of the past rather than a live feed, so several months of history can land entirely outside a short window.

Scroll to Metric coverage. It reports, for each metric, how many of the sessions currently in view actually carried it, as a fraction and a percentage.

Read it before the tiles. A tool-call total with 30 percent coverage is a true statement about 30 percent of your sessions, and a true statement about the wrong denominator is how people mislead themselves with their own data.

A tile that reads Not available is not a zero and not a bug. It means no session in this view reported that value.

Every metric carries one of five labels, and the line under each tile tells you which kind of number you are looking at.

Nothing is ever backfilled with a zero to make a chart look complete.

Under each tile is a comparison with the window of exactly the same length immediately before the current one. Rolling 30 days is compared with the 30 days before it.

All time has no previous window, so it says No comparable prior-period value rather than inventing a baseline. Treat that as the honest answer it is.

Providers, projects, and a model filter narrow the same view. Hold Ctrl or Command to select more than one provider or project.

Two filtering habits are worth building. First, compare one provider against itself over time rather than against another provider — different sources expose different fields, so cross-provider gaps are often format differences rather than behaviour differences. Second, when a total looks wrong, filter down until it looks right; the filter that fixes it names the cause.

Any single session page shows its adapter version, normalization version, source, last import, metric quality, the calculation used, warnings, and limitations.

This is the escape hatch. If a total surprises you, one session will usually tell you whether the source under-reports, the adapter derived rather than read the value, or you are simply busier than you thought.

Every section of the dashboard — the filters, the import status panel, the tiles, both charts, the heatmap, and every list below them — carries a collapsed disclosure under its heading. Opening it answers four fixed questions about that section and nothing else:

1. What this measures. The quantity, stated without hedging.
2. How it is calculated. Which sessions are included, which are excluded, and what happens to the ones with no value.
3. What high and low mean. How to read a big number or a small one.
4. What could mislead you. The specific way this section, and not some other section, can be read wrong.

The fourth is the one to read. Every section on the page can mislead you in a way particular to it: the timeline counts session starts, so a single long day of work is a low point; the heatmap flattens a 90-day window into one average week; the provider split shows where your sessions live and says nothing about where your time went.

Each disclosure ends with a link to the full method, so nothing depends on remembering what the summary said.

Under each chart is Show the data as a table. It opens the exact series the chart was drawn from — the same numbers, not a re-computation — with a row per day, per length band, or per weekday.

Use it when you want to copy a figure, when a point is too small to hover, or when you want to check what a suspicious peak actually is. A day whose sessions came from an export with no prompt counts reads Not available in the table, never 0, which is usually the fastest way to tell a quiet day apart from an unreported one.

If you use a screen reader, the table is the chart. The graphic itself is announced as a single image that points at the table below it, rather than reciting a hundred data points into one unnavigable label.

API-equivalent cost has the strictest rules on the page, and it is allowed to show nothing.

It is calculated from a dated rate table and refuses when token counts are missing, when a model is not in the table, or when a single session used two models with different prices — because token attribution between them would be ambiguous. It is an API-equivalent estimate of what the same tokens would have cost on a pay-as-you-go API. It is not your subscription bill.

Metrics, provenance, and quality lists what the estimate excludes.

Session counts, prompt counts, and hours describe activity, not value. They cannot tell you whether the work was good, and they compare tools and export formats as much as they compare people.

They also describe only what you imported. A provider you have not imported is absent, not zero.

When you are ready to publish a number, share a snapshot safely shows how to do it without leaking the rest of your account.