Tracking Usage

Displayr is priced a bit like a mobile phone plan or other utility, where the pricing is based on how much you use it. When you purchase a license, one named user is entitled to 1,000 hours of usage over a 12-month period. This averages out to around 20 hours per week. Time is consumed while you are using the app. Optionally, time can also be purchased for people to view your documents online. This article explains ways that you can track your usage.

Usage bar in Edit mode

When you are editing your documents in Displayr (called Edit mode), a bar is shown in the top right corner of your screen to indicate how much Edit time you have remaining. If you hover your mouse over the bar you can get a precise figure.

The Licenses page

In your Account Settings there is a section called Licenses which displays all of the licenses you have purchased, along with any additional blocks of editing or viewing time that you have purchased. Each line contains a readout of the number of hours that have been used and which are remaining. If you hover your mouse over the numbers you will get a more detailed explanation.

The Usage page

The Usage section of your Account Settings page contains a list of all of the edit, view and API sessions for your account. You can control the start and end time of this report, and you can also export this report as a CSV file by clicking the icon at the top right of the table.

Email notifications

If you consume more than 50% of your hours before the middle of the year, you'll receive a notification by email. Notifications will then be sent by the Displayr system when your usage exceeds 80%, 90%, 95%, 99%, and 100% of usage.

Tracking API hours

Displayr does not track the time made for individual API calls. Rather, it tracks server time. Calling Displayr's API directly utilizes your view-mode hours and will appear in your Usage section under (API) as the User.

API usage against a Free document uses up the Free licence view-mode hours. API usage against a Professional document uses up the Server time for private dashboards hours.

Viewing hours are computed based on the hours that the server hosting the document is active. When a document is initially published as a web page, a server is started to host the document. If no-one interacts further with the document through viewing pages or changing filters, for example, the server is shut down after 10 minutes. Later, if the published document is viewed, the server is started again in order to provide data, and again the server is shut down after 10 minutes. You can control this 10-minute period in the Document Settings page, under Properties > When viewing this document, Displayr will stop your server after (minutes).

Note the instruction "While running, your server can respond without taking the time to start, but uses license minutes." There is a cost to starting a server and loading the required data. So if this time is set very low (e.g. 1 minute), it is likely that viewers of the document will see "Please wait" until the server has started.

Usage starts to be tracked as soon as the first API call is made. Then, the server remains active for another 10 minutes (this time is controlled by the Document Settings page under Properties > When editing this document, Displayr will stop your server after (minutes)). If you make another API call within the 10-minute period, the server continues to remain active for another 10 minutes. When the server finally shuts down, we subtract a grace period from the overall time period (typically 5 minutes).

So, for example, if you made an API call just once an hour, you would expect to see a usage time of 5 minutes for each API call (server was started and active for 10 minutes - grace time of 5 minutes = usage of 5 minutes). After a day, you would expect to see 120 minutes of usage (5 minutes of usage per hour * 24 hours = 120 minutes).

If you wish to issue API calls every 5 minutes, this effectively means the document's server will remain active indefinitely (24 hours per day). After a day, you would expect to see a full 24 hours of usage. Over a year this will total to roughly 8,760 hours.