Tracking dashboard downloads (2025)

[dani_elf]

Hey community!

It is 2025 and we're still struggling to put together a clear picture of how often our embed users are downloading dashboards.

It looks like the event export_query tracks downloads of CSV files. That's already something. The key question is how do we know whether those events refer to individual dashboard tiles getting downloaded by embed users versus the entire dashboard being downloaded at once by embed users?

The distinction is relevant but perhaps not appropriately traceable across system activity explores.

On one hand, I can definitely see examples of particular queries that were downloaded by embed users. You find them together with their history_id values in the event attribute explore. Then you use the history_id value to lookup the history record in the history explore.

Now the trouble is that we can have history records associated to export_query events that have multiple information about the query fields that were used in the query. That gives an indication about what is being exported already. But that's it. We don't know whether it is a query being exported as part of the "export everything" flow or whether it is a query being exported from an individual dashboard tile.

To make things even more interesting, it can happen that history records associated to export_query events simply do not have any query information attached to them. In those cases, we don't even know what is being exported. Is this a proxy to indicate that the entire dashboard is being exported in one go?

Thanks,

Daniel

[sam8]

According to my tests:

• Downloading individual tiles triggers the "export_query" event.
• Downloading the entire dashboard, whether as a CSV zip or PDF, does not trigger the "export_query" event.
• Downloading the entire dashboard as a PDF triggers the "render_job" event.
• Downloading the entire dashboard as a CSV zip doesn't seem to trigger any unique events.

So, in summary, you can track individual tile downloads and full dashboard PDF downloads. There appears to be a blind spot in the System Activity event explore for downloading the entire dashboard as CSV files. I'll double check with the team to see if there is another way to capture that occurence.

[sam8 · Accepted solution]

OK, I found out that you can track the CSV zip downloads separately, using the history explore. (not the event explore). 

You want to filter for the History Source as "data-download-api". This will filter for only queries from the CSV zip downloads. 

 I'm not sure if there's a way to combine the two queries into one, but you can at least use those two queries to get a complete picture of all downloads from your dashboard.

/explore/system__activity/history?fields=history.source,history.issuer_source,history.created_time,history.id&f[history.source]=data-download-api

[dani_elf]

Many thanks @sam8 - I'm actually gonna accept this a solution because my main use-case is to be able to report on CSV downloads of the entire dashboard. Hope others will find this thread useful as well!