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Activity heatmap

See when a single event happens across a typical week, laid out as a grid of weekday against hour of day.

An Activity heatmap takes one event and shows how its counts spread across a typical week. It lays the event out on a grid of weekday against hour of day, so the busy stretches and the quiet ones jump straight out at you.

Where a Metric widget answers "how many?" and a Histogram answers "how big?", a heatmap answers "when?" - which days and which hours your event tends to happen.

What it shows

The widget is a grid:

  • Rows are the days of the week, Monday through Sunday.
  • Columns are the hours of the day, 0 (midnight) through 23 (11pm).
  • Each cell is the number of times your chosen event happened in that weekday-and-hour slot over the dashboard's time range. Busier slots stand out from the quiet ones, so patterns are easy to spot at a glance.

That gives you 7 rows by 24 columns: a single picture of your whole week.

Setting one up

An Activity heatmap is the simplest widget to configure - you only pick the event.

  1. On a dashboard, choose Add widget.
  2. Pick the event you want to look at (for example player_join or purchase).
  3. Choose the Activity heatmap type, give it a title, and check the live preview.

There is no measure, breakdown, or property to set. The widget always counts how many of that event landed in each slot.

Hours are in UTC

The grid is computed in UTC, not your local time or your players' local time. If most of your audience is in another timezone, remember to shift the hours in your head. A spike that reads as 2 in UTC is early evening on the US west coast.

Why you would use it

A heatmap is about timing. Reach for it when you want to know when something happens, not just how often. For example:

  • Pick player_join and you might see cells light up on Saturday and Sunday evenings - that is when people actually sit down to play. Now you know when to ship an update or run an event.
  • Pick purchase and a weekday lunchtime band might stand out, telling you the best window to run a promotion.
  • Pick error or crash and a quiet slot on the grid is a safe window to schedule maintenance, while a bright cluster points at a recurring trouble spot.

Because the grid is one event across the whole week, it is the fastest way to answer "what are our busy times?" before you dig into the detail with other widgets.

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