About Insights
The Insights plugin is your window into Backstage usage at your organization. You can measure Backstage adoption, identify anomalous trends, and understand user behavior.
Measure adoption
We built Insights to help you understand how Backstage is being adopted at your organization. Use it to validate your efforts to bring developers onto your platform and identify areas where you can double-down.
Identify trends
The Insights plugin uses intuitive graphs to benchmark and compare user behavior data over time. You can identify trends or spot anomalous days in your organization’s Backstage usage.
Understand behavior
Insights helps you know how Backstage users are actually behaving. The plugin captures and displays key user behavior data, including the most commonly used plugins and the most active pages within them.
Insights features
Active users data
Quickly see this week’s active users compared with last week’s. This data is available at both the overall Backstage application and individual plugin levels.
Week-over-week trends
Insights visualizes daily usage for both individual plugins and your entire Backstage app. Discover trends as you compare this data week-over-week.
Plugin-level data
Get a high level overview of what plugins your colleagues are engaging with most. Drill-down to get a detailed look at how each plugin is being used over time.
Frequently Asked Questions 🤔
Where can I find installation instructions and technical documentation for Insights?
All of the installation instructions for the Spotify Plugins for Backstage are public via npm packages. You can find the documentation specifically for Insights in this npm package. What metrics does Insights track?
We built Insights based on years of experience tracking adoption and usage of Backstage at Spotify. Based on this experience, Insights surfaces two fundamental metrics: active users (the unique count of users interacting with Backstage as a whole, or within a given plugin) and page views (on a per-plugin basis).How is Insights different from other analytics services?
While traditional web and product analytics tools attempt to answer broad questions about how users spend time on web apps, Insights’ aim is to specifically focus on questions of developer experience. Today, that may resemble a “batteries included” analytics tool for Backstage. But tomorrow, we hope to surface much more.Does Insights only work with Spotify Plugins for Backstage?
Insights is able to surface trends across every part of your Backstage application, whether it’s in an open source plugin, one of the other plugins included in the Spotify Plugins bundle, or in a custom plugin developed in-house at your organization.Is Insights installed and deployed on-prem?
Insights is a hosted service offered by Spotify. While installing Insights is no different than installing other plugins in Backstage, Spotify takes care of availability and scaling on your behalf. Dashboards are available through your account profile on backstage.spotify.com.Who can access our data?
Data and dashboards are only accessible by authorized users of your choosing. Access within Spotify is restricted to only those operating and improving the product.