Weekly and Monthly Active Users Analytics Cards Show Inflated Counts – DataHub Customer Support Portal

Area: UI Issues

Sub-Area: Analytics & Usage Metrics

Issue

The Weekly Active Users (WAU) and Monthly Active Users (MAU) summary cards displayed at the top of the DataHub Analytics page may show dramatically inflated counts that far exceed an organization's actual number of human users. This occurs because the summary cards count all distinct actor URNs that generated activity within the time window — including ingestion service accounts, API bot accounts, and other automated system processes — rather than unique authenticated human users. The underlying WAU/MAU charts located further down the same Analytics page are calculated differently and are not affected by this bug, displaying accurate counts suitable for adoption tracking.

You Might Be Asking

Why does the Monthly Active Users card show a number several times larger than my total employee count?
Are the Weekly and Monthly Active Users numbers on the Analytics page accurate for adoption KPI reporting?
What is the difference between the WAU/MAU summary cards and the WAU/MAU charts on the Analytics page?
Which Analytics metric should I use to track real human user adoption in DataHub?

Root Cause

The summary cards at the top of the Analytics page count all actor URNs that generated usage events within the rolling time window. The exclusion logic in the affected versions filters out only the built-in admin user. As a result, the following actor types are incorrectly included in the WAU/MAU card counts:

Ingestion service accounts — each ingestion connector or scheduled pipeline run typically operates under a dedicated service account URN.
API bot accounts — any programmatic access via personal access tokens or service tokens generates actor URN activity.
Automated system processes — background jobs and system-level interactions with DataHub metadata are attributed to actor URNs and counted.

Organizations with multiple ingestion pipelines (e.g., separate connectors for Snowflake, dbt, BigQuery, Looker, etc.) each running under a distinct service account can experience counts that are several multiples of their actual human user base.

Solution

Do not rely on the summary cards at the top of the Analytics page for adoption KPI reporting. These highlight numbers (the large bold WAU and MAU figures near the top of the page) are affected by this bug and will overcount activity.
Use the WAU/MAU charts in the Usage Analytics section instead. Scroll down on the Analytics page past the summary cards to find the Weekly Active Users and Monthly Active Users line charts. These charts count unique authenticated human user URNs and exclude service/bot accounts, making them accurate for adoption tracking.
```
Navigation: Analytics → (scroll down) → Usage Analytics section
  → "Weekly Active Users" chart
  → "Monthly Active Users" chart
```
Understand chart behavior for the current period:
- The Monthly Active Users chart only plots complete calendar months. The current in-progress month will not appear as a data point until the month closes.
- The Weekly Active Users chart does include the current (partial) week as its most recent data point. This number will increment throughout the week as more users are active. When comparing trends, compare completed weeks against each other for consistency.

Optionally, audit service and bot accounts to understand what non-human actors exist in your environment. This can help you separately track ingestion health versus human adoption:

Settings → Users & Groups → Users
  (review accounts flagged as service or bot accounts)

Settings → Access Tokens
  (review programmatic tokens associated with service accounts)

Upgrade to DataHub version 2.3.1 or later to receive the permanent fix. The corrected summary cards properly exclude service accounts, ingestion runners, API bots, and other automated actors, displaying only human user counts. Verify the fix is active by confirming the summary card values align reasonably with the values shown in the Usage Analytics charts below.

Additional Notes

This bug was confirmed and tracked by DataHub engineering. The fix was released in DataHub version 2.3.1. Users on versions prior to 2.3.1 should upgrade to resolve the inflated card counts.
The underlying Usage Analytics charts (WAU/MAU line charts) were not affected by this bug at any version and can be trusted for adoption reporting even before upgrading.
If your WAU/MAU card values still appear inflated after upgrading to 2.3.1 or later, verify that your deployment has fully completed the upgrade and contact DataHub Support for further investigation.
For DataHub Cloud deployments, infrastructure updates are managed by DataHub Support; no customer-side configuration changes are required beyond confirming the version upgrade.

Issue

You Might Be Asking

Root Cause

Solution

Additional Notes

Related Documentation