Using the Analytics Dashboard
The smoxy RUM Analytics Dashboard provides real-time insights into your website's performance from your actual users' perspectives. This guide will help you navigate and understand the dashboard.
Accessing the Dashboard
- Log in to smoxy Hub
- Navigate to Real User Monitoring
Dashboard Overview
The RUM dashboard is organized into several key sections:
1. Core Web Vitals Widget
Location: Top of the dashboard
What it shows:
- Current 75th percentile values for LCP, INP, and CLS
- Classification (Good/Needs Improvement/Poor) for each metric
How to use it:
- Quick health check of your site's performance
- Identify which Core Web Vitals need attention
- Monitor day-to-day changes
INFO
Goal: Keep all three metrics in the "Good" (green) range for optimal SEO and user experience.
2. Performance Trend Chart
What it shows:
- Time-series visualization of your overall Core Web Vitals status
- Whether your site is performing "Good", "Needs Improvement", or "Poor" over time
- Historical performance trends to identify patterns
How to use it:
- Select time range (Last 24 hours, 7 days, 30 days, custom)
- View the trend of your overall performance status
- Identify when performance changed from one status to another
Common patterns to look for:
- Status changes: When did performance move from "Good" to "Needs Improvement"?
- Time-of-day patterns: Does performance degrade during peak traffic hours?
- Deployment correlation: Did a recent deployment change your performance status?
- Day-of-week patterns: Better performance on weekends vs. weekdays?
INFO
Pro Tip: Use this chart to correlate performance changes with deployments, traffic spikes, or configuration changes. A sudden status change often indicates something specific happened at that time.
3. Geographic Performance Map
What it shows:
- World map color-coded by performance
- Country-level aggregation
- Overall Core Web Vitals status per region
Color coding:
- Green: All Core Web Vitals are "Good"
- Yellow: Some metrics "Need Improvement"
- Red: One or more metrics are "Poor"
- Gray: No data or insufficient data
How to use it:
- Identify geographic regions with poor performance
- Click on a country to see detailed metrics
- Compare performance across regions
Common insights:
- Distant regions may need regional CDN optimization
- Specific countries with consistently poor performance may indicate ISP issues
- Check if your target markets have good performance
Action items:
- If key markets show poor performance, consider:
- Regional CDN configuration
- Local server presence
- Network route optimization
4. Per-URL Performance Table
What it shows:
- Performance metrics broken down by individual URLs
- Event count (number of tracked page views)
- All Core Web Vitals and timing metrics per page
Columns:
- URL/Page Path
- Views (event count)
- LCP, INP, CLS
- Core Web Vitals Rating
How to use it:
- Sort by any column to find outliers
- Identify pages with poor performance
Sorting strategies:
Sort by Views → Focus on high-traffic pages first
Sort by LCP → Find pages with loading issues
Sort by INP → Find unresponsive pages
WARNING
Important: Focus on pages with significant traffic first. A slow page with 10 views/month has less impact than a moderately slow page with 10,000 views/month.
Common Dashboard Workflows
1. Daily Performance Check
Goal: Quick health check of site performance
- Open dashboard
- Check Core Web Vitals widget - all green?
- Look at trend chart for any concerning spikes
- Review top 5 pages by traffic - any new issues?
- Takes 2-3 minutes
2. Post-Deployment Validation
Goal: Verify deployment didn't hurt performance
- Note the deployment time
- Set custom time range: 24 hours before → 24 hours after
- Check trend chart for changes at deployment time
- Review Core Web Vitals: did any metrics worsen?
- Check per-URL table for affected pages
- If performance degraded, investigate and roll back if necessary
3. Optimization Prioritization
Goal: Identify what to optimize for maximum impact
- Set time range to "Last 30 Days" for stable data
- Sort per-URL table by "Views" descending
- Filter to top 20 pages by traffic
- Sort by LCP to find slowest high-traffic pages
- These are your optimization priorities
- Create tickets/tasks for top 5 pages
4. Geographic Performance Analysis
Goal: Ensure good performance in target markets
- Open geographic map
- Identify red/yellow regions
- Click on key market countries
- Review detailed metrics
- Compare TTFB across regions (indicates CDN effectiveness)
- If key markets are slow, investigate:
- CDN coverage in that region
- Network routing
- Regional ISP issues
Best Practices
Regular Monitoring
✅ Daily: Quick Core Web Vitals check (2 minutes)
✅ Weekly: Review trend chart and top pages (10 minutes)
✅ Monthly: Comprehensive performance review and optimization planning (30 minutes)
✅ Post-Deployment: Always check within 24 hours of any change
Setting Performance Goals
Minimum goals (for SEO and basic UX):
- LCP < 2.5s
- INP < 200ms
- CLS < 0.1
- All metrics in "Good" range
Stretch goals (for excellent UX):
- LCP < 1.5s
- INP < 100ms
- CLS < 0.05
- Page Load Time < 2s
Optimization Workflow
- Measure: Use dashboard to identify issues
- Prioritize: Focus on high-traffic pages with poor metrics
- Optimize: Make targeted improvements
- Validate: Use dashboard to confirm improvements
- Iterate: Continue cycle with next priority
Need More Advanced Analytics?
The smoxy RUM dashboard provides comprehensive insights for most use cases. However, if you need:
- Custom metric calculations
- Advanced segmentation
- Integration with your existing monitoring tools
- Custom alerting rules
- Long-term trend analysis beyond the dashboard
Check out our open source Grafana dashboard project:
Custom Dashboards with Grafana
This allows you to build fully customized visualizations using your RUM data via API, all while smoxy continues collecting and storing the data.