Metrics tell you how much the campus is used. But often the question is more specific: who did what, when and where? That's what Analytics is for, and it's worth approaching it backwards: not from the report you're going to pull, but from what you need to find out.
In the Analytics tab, the summary and the detail live side by side. Metrics and Advanced reports show you the big picture: overall campus usage, disk space, activity across classrooms. That's the forest view. But when you need to follow one specific tree —a person, an action, a date— the place to go is Users, Activity and, above all, Audit.
Let's go through those three based on the questions that come up most often in administration.
🔎Do you need to know what a person (or several) did on the campus?
That's the territory of the Users submenu. You enter a filter screen where you can narrow down by user (it searches username, first name and last name), profile (it lists those who hold that role in at least one classroom), status (active, deactivated or all) and a date range. One key detail: the dates don't change who appears in the list, they only affect the Interactions and Last interaction columns.
The list shows you each user with their enrollments, their interactions and their last activity. And for each row you have two buttons that are the heart of this section: generating the traceability report or the participation report. If you click on the name, you enter the user's filtered view, with all their classrooms and the option to generate the same reports classroom by classroom.
The traceability report reconstructs the activity step by step. And it truly reconstructs it: if you filter by user only, their movements outside the classrooms also appear —campus access, the Desktop— and even records in classrooms they no longer belong to or that were deleted. It's the best answer when someone asks “what happened with this user?”.
📊Do you want to measure how they participated, not just whether they logged in?
Then the one you're looking for is the participation report, generated from those same screens. Instead of “what they did”, it answers “how much and where they got involved”: progress, interactions, first and last interaction, estimated time of use and number of emails sent, broken down by classroom sections.
That breakdown by sections is what makes it useful for pedagogical follow-up. In forums it counts not only the topics, but in how many the person took part and how many contributions they made; in wikis, in how many they left at least one edit; and the same with files, sites, surveys or announcements, distinguishing what exists from what that user uploaded.
A fine point for reading the numbers correctly: the estimated time of use counts a maximum of 30 minutes between clicks. If someone leaves the tab open, that idle time isn't counted.
📉Is someone slipping through the cracks?
That's what the Activity menu is for, designed to review access conditions. It lets you filter by users without access and by users who haven't logged in for N days, and returns the list with each one's name, email and enrollments.
It's the follow-up tool par excellence: it detects in time anyone who is falling behind in the course. And since each Id is a direct link to the user's view, you can go from “this person hasn't logged in for 20 days” to seeing their full detail in one click.
The heart of this article
🛡️Do you need to know who performed a certain action in administration, and when?
Here we get into Audit, which is where Analytics stops looking at the participants and starts looking at those of us who administer. It's the record of the actions carried out in administration by the users authorized to access it. Simply put: who touched what.
The filter is understated and powerful. You specify —if you want— a user, choose the processes you're interested in reviewing and a date range. The result shows you, for each action, the number of times it was performed; and by clicking on that number, you see exactly which ones. It's best to narrow the filters well: a huge report is hard to read and heavy on the server.
What's interesting is everything that gets recorded. It's not just “a classroom was modified”. The range of auditable actions includes, among many others:
- Classrooms and users: creations, deletions and modifications; activating/deactivating; copying classrooms; copying, moving, enrolling and importing users between classrooms.
- Program: creating, editing and deleting units, texts, study material, activities, assessments, surveys, debates, SCORM packages and LTI resources.
- AI / Tutored course: training and retraining the tutor, cancelling trainings, bulk actions and configuration changes (virtual tutor, OpenAI, Azure, Edu GPT).
- Communication and certificates: sending certificates (bulk or individual), bulk messages, follow-up notices and bulk news and forum notices.
On top of that come tools such as reassigning the content owner, purging the repository or changing the global administration language. It is, in effect, the institutional memory of what happens behind the scenes: invaluable when you have to reconstruct a change, clear up a doubt or simply have clarity about who decided what.
One detail to keep in mind: Audit reports are delivered with dates according to the user who generates them. Worth bearing in mind if you compare records between people.
⚙️Four best practices that apply to the whole tab
Always filter as much as possible. A very long report is hard to analyze and very demanding on the server. Don't pull everything if you're going to look at a single person.
Narrow by date. It rarely helps to bring up six months to see what happened two days ago.
Choose the right time. It's best to generate reports during low-usage periods; avoid the 6 p.m. slot, which tends to be the busiest.
Remember the history. By default, up to six months back are queried (temporarily extendable through support). For a full year, it's best to generate two reports, one per semester. Traceability and participation outputs arrive in xlsx format.
The summary isn't replaced: it's complemented
Metrics and Advanced reports remain the starting point for understanding the campus's pulse. What Users, Activity and Audit add is the ability to drill down to the specific case: follow a person, recover whoever is falling behind and know precisely who did each thing in administration. That's the difference between looking at the forest and being able to track the tree.
And if at some point the result isn't enough —you need an extra detail, you can't find an action you want to audit, or you'd like help interpreting what you see— write to soporte@educativa.com indicating the filters used and the action you have questions about.
educativa Team / educativa Support Dept.