Usage dashboard

The Usage Dashboard provides comprehensive observability into your authorization service, allowing you to monitor key metrics, view trends, and get insights into how your Cerbos Hub workspace is utilized.

Overview

The Usage Dashboard is accessible from two locations:

  • The workspace homepage - provides a quick reference overview

  • The dedicated "Usage" section - offers detailed metrics and historical data

Key metrics

The dashboard surfaces several critical metrics to help you monitor your authorization layer.

Monthly Active Principals (MAPs)

Track the number of unique principals (users, services, or applications) interacting with your authorization policies each month. This metric helps you:

  • Understand user adoption and growth

  • Identify unexpected usage patterns

  • Plan for capacity requirements

Check API calls

Monitor the volume of Check API calls and their outcomes. Note that the total number of outcomes might be higher than the number of calls because a single API call could be used to check multiple actions at once.

  • Allowed: Decisions that granted access

  • Denied: Decisions that rejected access

A sudden spike in denied calls could indicate:

  • New policy changes that are intentionally or unintentionaly stricter than before

  • Requests for policies or actions that don’t exist

  • Application implementation issues such as typos or requests not conforming to configured schemas

Plan API calls

Monitor the volume of Plan API calls and their outcomes.

  • Allowed: Generated plan allows unconditional access

  • Denied: Generated plan denies access unconditionally

  • Conditional: Generated plan allows conditional access

This breakdown is crucial for understanding the API calls that are used to dynamically generate database queries and conditional access patterns.

Usage details table

Below the visualization widgets, the "Usage details" table provides granular, month-by-month metrics including:

Metric

Description

Check calls

Total number of Check API calls made

Plan calls

Total number of Plan API calls made

Unique principals

Count of distinct principals making authorization requests

Total calls

Combined total of all API calls