Warning: our onboarding data was 40% wrong until I checked the actual user logs

I run a small roofing company but I handle the software side too, and last month I pulled the raw login timestamps from our B2B SaaS onboarding tool. Turns out the fancy dashboard was showing 300 active users but the real logs only had 180 people actually clicking past step two. Has anyone else caught their analytics dashboard lying about user engagement like that?

3 comments

3 Comments

ross.lily15d agoMost Upvoted

Used to think dashboards were basically the truth, but this changed my whole view on it. The fancy graphs don't always match what's actually happening in the backend logs, and that's a scary gap. Your 40% number is rough but honestly probably common, most people just never dig deep enough to notice. Pulling raw timestamps is the only real way to know, everything else is just a pretty guess.

nguyen.morgan15d ago

Double down on that raw timestamp approach. Last week I caught a dashboard showing 99.9% uptime but when I pulled the actual logs there were three 30 second outages in a single day the aggregation just smoothed over. The difference between a rolling average and what users actually experience is massive. People need to query their own data instead of trusting those pre-baked metrics.

reese_lee915d ago

Wow, that's brutal. I feel for you on that one. Three outages in a single day that the dashboard just wiped away like they never happened. That's the kind of thing that makes you lose sleep when you're the one on call. It's one thing to hear about the gap between averages and reality, but another thing to have it slap you in the face with your own data. I've been burned enough times that now I always demand to see the raw numbers before I trust any pretty chart. Hope you were able to get the guys running that dashboard to actually fix their reporting instead of just shrugging it off.