Continu Insights lets you build, filter, share, and schedule your own dashboards without an analyst. Start by copying a pre-built dashboard, adjust the filters to your audience, and pin new visualizations from any data source, or ask Continu AI a question and pin the result. Custom dashboard creation and Continu AI require Insights Pro.
What Insights is
Insights is Continu’s built-in business intelligence tool. It ships with pre-built dashboards for user engagement, assignment snapshots, and content audits, and lets you create custom dashboards, share them with specific people or profiles, and schedule automated delivery of reports as PDF, CSV, or Excel.
Insights is for initiative-level and leadership reporting: completion rates across an org, activity trends, workshop registrations, leaderboards. Two other tools cover different needs. For a raw data export you can filter, save, and download as a spreadsheet, use the Reports section. For tracking one learner’s progress through one piece of content, use the content-level report (the analytics icon on the content itself). That’s where individual-level detail lives.
Insights Core and Insights Pro
- Insights Core includes the pre-built dashboards. You can filter them, use the drill-down option, and adjust which metrics display, but not change their underlying structure. Pre-built dashboards can’t be broken: they live in Continu and always stay intact. Core is included with Enterprise plans and available as a paid add-on on other plans.
- Insights Pro is a paid add-on that unlocks building your own dashboards and visualizations from scratch, plus Continu AI, which answers plain-language questions about your data.
The building steps in this article assume Insights Pro. If you’re not sure which tier you have, or want to see Pro in action, reach out to your Customer Success Manager.
Plan before you build
The best dashboards answer a specific question for a specific person. Before you start, make three decisions:
- Define the audience. An executive, a manager, a program owner? Build one dashboard per audience.
- Choose your metrics. Pick 3 to 6 things that matter: completion rate, active learners, workshop attendance. A focused dashboard is more useful than a wall of data.
- Name the story. “Are my teams on track with this year’s compliance training?” is a dashboard. “Show me everything” is a spreadsheet export.
Start from a copy
The fastest way to build is to copy a dashboard that’s close to what you need, either one of the pre-built dashboards or one you’ve already customized:
- Open the dashboard and make a copy.
- Remove the filters at the top of the copy so you start clean.
- Review each visualization. Visualizations carry their own filters independently of the dashboard.
- Add back only the filters your use case needs: department, location, date range, assigned vs. discovered content.
- Rename the dashboard and save.
If you plan to reuse a dashboard on a cycle (quarterly business reviews, for example), build it once and update only the date filter each period rather than rebuilding.
Add new visualizations
- Click Search Data to explore your data directly. In the dropdown at the top left, choose the data source you want: user engagement, content engagement, workshops, and so on.
- Build the view you want (a table, chart, or leaderboard), then pin it to your dashboard.
- One dashboard can hold visualizations from different data sources, so learning content, workshops, and engagement can sit side by side on the same board.
- With Insights Pro, you can also ask Continu AI a question in plain language, like “module completions by department this quarter,” and pin the result to your dashboard.
Working with filters
- Filters save in edit mode only. Changing a filter while viewing a dashboard is temporary. To make a change permanent: open Edit, change the filter, and save.
- Dashboard filters apply to the whole board. Keep top-level filters for things every visualization should pivot on, like a date range or a department.
- Use a filter inside a visualization when only that one view should be filtered, like a leaderboard for a single team.
- Don’t filter the same field at both levels. If a field is filtered on the dashboard and inside a visualization, the dashboard filter takes priority and the numbers can look wrong. Pick one level per field.
Insights includes all users and content by default, including suspended users and archived content. If your numbers don’t match an admin report, add a filter for active users first.
Share your dashboard
Share a finished dashboard with individual users or with a profile. Profile-based sharing is view-only: recipients see the data without edit or admin permissions, which makes it the right way to roll a dashboard out to a group of managers.
Schedule delivery
Any dashboard can be scheduled for automated delivery by email or Slack, as PDF, CSV, or Excel. Scheduled delivery works well for stakeholders who want the numbers without logging in. A rollout pattern that works: start managers with a scheduled email, and when they start asking to tweak what’s in it, that’s the signal to give them view access so they can filter and explore the dashboard themselves.