Performance insights

This feature is available to app admins (app builders) on the Enterprise plan.

Performance Insights recommends clear actions you can take to improve performance. It will also identify places where you should follow best practices to improve app scalability. Performance insights covers things like:

• Reports, pages, and dashboards that are loading slowly

• Inefficient settings that are turned on or other performance resources that are not being used

• Best practices when using API calls

• Traffic, schema design, and other patterns that can be improved

Accessing performance insights

1. In your app, click the settings icon, then App management.

2. Under Manage App Structure, click Performance management. The page will open to the Performance Insights tab. You’ll also see the Performance Optimizer tab. Performance Optimizer will automatically find and apply performance optimizations to your app. Use both Performance Insights and Performance Optimizer to quickly improve app performance.

Getting insights

1. To run performance insights, click the Get insights button.

2. In the dialog, choose a length of time to analyze app performance. You have the option to run performance insights for 1 minute, 10 minutes, 30 minutes, or 1 hour.
   The time interval you select will influence the type of insights you will see.

   • Intervals of 1 or 10 minutes will give you insight to short bursts of traffic or specific events that need to be analyzed

   • Intervals of 30 minutes or 1 hour will give you insights about app design and schema, as well as traffic or specific events

3. Click Get insights. You will see a message that performance insights has started. While performance insights analyzes your app, you can navigate away from the screen and use your app as normal.
   If you refresh the page while performance insights is still running, you will see a message that will give you an estimation on when to check back.

   

4. When the estimated time elapses, navigate back to Performance Insights to see a list of actionable recommendations. 

Understanding insights

Performance insights can be broken down into three main categories:

• App design

• API or integration patterns

• Reporting

Each insight includes the following information.

Note: All times and dates that appear in individual insights are based on the browser's timezone.

Priority level

This helps you determine how much the issue or observation described in the insight may be impacting your app’s performance.

Priority levels include:

• High — likely has a heavy impact on performance

• Medium — likely has a moderate impact on performance

• Low — likely has only some impact on performance

• Info — does not impact performance but is an opportunity to follow best practices and make troubleshooting easier

Insight summary

In a few words, each insight will give a summary of what was found. For insights where it makes sense, the insight also provides how often the issue came up during analysis.

For example, you might see the summary

Slow-loading page • Accessed 3 times 

Insight details

Each insight will include more information and the relevant details you need to take action.

App design

Insights about app design will include scenarios like:

• Inefficient app settings that are turned on

• Specific design patterns that can be optimized

Each insight will include:

• Where to change the app settings

• Why you should consider changing them

• Relevant apps, tables, fields and/or reports

Note: Some insights that give recommendations on app design will only appear if you run performance insights for at least 30 minutes.

API or integration patterns

Insights about API or integration patterns will include information like:

• API calls that are looping

• API calls missing user agents

• API calls with intense queries that are taking a long time to process

• Pipelines that needs to be optimized or are encountering errors

Each insight will list relevant apps or tables. If applicable, they will also contain lists of information like API calls being made or IP addresses where the API calls are coming from. When information like this is listed out, you’ll see the top five values listed on the insight. If there are more than five that are not listed, you’ll see an indication on the insight.

In most cases, knowing the top five values is enough to troubleshoot. However, if you wanted to see more than the initial five values listed, you would need to resolve issues with the first five and then run performance insights again.

Reporting

Insights about reporting will include information like:

• Reports that are loading slowly and probable causes

• Specific users experiencing slow load times

Like the other insight types, these insights will also list out relevant information like report IDs and users. These lists will also only include the most frequent values, indicating if there are more than what is listed on the insight.

App name

To make it easy to see, each insight will show the app name and ID of the app it analyzed. If there is an applicable table, the table name and ID will also be shown.

Viewing a previous run

When you navigate to the Performance Insights tab, it will be populated with the most recent run. to see older runs, click the down arrow on the Run box.

The most recent runs are listed at the beginning of the list.

Filtering insights

You can filter insights by: 

• Priority
• Category
• Table
  Note: The table filter also includes the availability to filter by app