Activity Data
Administrators in CARTO can analyze very granularly what is happening inside their organization with our detailed Activity Data. This data can be exported manually using the UI, or obtained programmatically via API.
Activity Data is only available for Enterprise Medium plans and above. Please get in touch at support@carto.com if you’re interested in this feature.
Some examples on how to use Activity Data include:
Generate user-level engagement reports: find out which users are more active in your organization
Generate company-level engagement reports: find out how many maps and workflows have been created in the last month
Use this data as audit logs to explore specific security and compliant events
Identify which maps and workflows are used the most/least.
Identify which users, dates, APIs and components consume the most Usage Quota.
Access via UI
To export Activity Data from CARTO Workspace, simply go to Settings > Quotas & Activity > Activity Data. You will see a main action called Export CARTO activity data. Click on the button to start the process.
You will need to select the period of data that you want to export. Data is available since the beginning of your CARTO organization, but each operation can only export a maximum of 60 days of data. If you want to schedule or automate this export, please check Access via API.
To calculate the cutoff for the from and to dates, we use UTC timezones: for example, when you export data from June 1st, 2024, we will only include events and usage that happened after June 1st, 2024 00:00 UTC.
The data can be exported in two formats, CSV and Parquet. Both formats should contain the exact same data.
Click on Export data and check the status in the top bar. Once it's finished, you will have the option to Download your Activity Data export.
The download panel will show the different download links for each table. Please note that when selecting longer date ranges multiple download links for the same table may be generated.
To understand the content and relationship between the different tables, check the Activity Data structure section.
Access via API
While the UI export is great to explore the CARTO Activity Data, in most cases you'll want to integrate this data into your existing data ingestion processes and business intelligence (BI) systems. For example, you may want to create adoption KPIs and dashboards that always use up-to-date activity data from CARTO. You can do this with the Activity Data API.
The steps to use the Activity Data API are:
Use an M2M OAuth Client to obtain an OAuth Access Token.
Use the OAuth Access Token to request a Data Activity export
The full API reference for the Activity Data API can be found in our API Documentation.
Please note that accessing Activity Data via API require access to Machine-to-Machine authentication, which is only available for Enterprise Large plans and above. Please get in touch at support@carto.com if you’re interested in this feature.
Activity Data structure
The CARTO Activity Data is composed of two categories of data: Activity logs and API usage, and Additional Data.
Activity Logs and API Usage
These tables contain the raw, detailed information about what happened in your organization and when. The data in these tables is mostly pseudonymized and sometimes requires the additional context provided in the additional data tables.
| Table | Content | Docs |
|---|---|---|
Activity logs | A complete collection of logs for every event that happened in your CARTO organization | |
API usage | A daily aggregation by user, API and component of your API usage, used to calculate your Usage Quota. |
Additional data
These tables do not contain information about what happened, but they contain useful relationships that allow you to match IDs to the real users and groups that they represent.
| Table | Content | Docs |
|---|---|---|
User list | A relationship between the ID and the email of all the current users in your organization | |
Group list | A relationship between the ID and the email of all the current groups in your organization, if groups are enabled |
Using your Activity Data
Extracting insights from your CARTO Activity Data should be very straight-forward, with the most typical setup being:
Export your Activity Data using the UI or the API, as explained above
Upload this data to your own database or BI tool
Analyze the data
(Optional) build KPIs, dashboards or other assets using this data
If you need help analyzing the data, we've prepared a few examples to get you started.
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