Introducing usage and performance metrics in Posit Connect Cloud

Your content on Connect Cloud is worth more when it runs well and people actually use it. With new usage metrics, you can now see how much compute it consumes. You can also see whether the CPU and memory you have allotted meets current demand, or if fine-tuning the limits make sense. 

Connect Cloud measures that consumption in usage credits, which accrue per hour based on the CPU and memory settings configured for your application or document. 

Each piece of content gets its own usage page, and account-level Usage and Metrics views roll everything up in one place.

Usage and performance metrics for every piece of content

Open a usage page by clicking the new Usage icon in the header of your content, next to the Settings gear.

Pick a time period and the page shows:

• Total usage credits consumed and total compute time
• A chart of credits used by day
• CPU and memory utilization, charted against the limits you set
• Concurrent connections and worker processes

The new CPU and memory charts can help you determine if your resources are right-sized to the application's complexity or amount of traffic that it is serving. One distinction worth knowing: applications generate usage both while being deployed and while serving visitors, but documents only generate usage while being rendered for publishing - someone viewing your published document doesn't add to your usage. 

The usage page for a single piece of content, showing credits, compute time, and resource charts for the selected period.
 

You can also test before sharing widely: publish, use the app the way your audience would, and clarify expectations for what your app may need to perform well and what credit usage may be consumed before anyone else touches it.

Export the data as a CSV if you want a closer look at the underlying usage and performance metrics detail.

See usage across all your content

If you have multiple pieces of published content, you can also view usage metrics across your account. Click Admin in the left navigation and you’ll see two new tab options, Usage and Metrics, that roll up these same metrics across all of your content.

Admin > Usage is the credits view:

• Total credits used, with the change from the previous period
• Total compute time across all content, and days until your next usage period begins
• A chart of credits used by day
• A ranking of content by credits consumed and compute time, along with current settings for CPU and memory. 

The Admin Usage view: account totals, the daily credits chart, and the start of the content ranking table.

Admin > Metrics is the utilization view. Filter by time period and you get a ranking of content by average CPU and memory utilization for that period, along with connections and processes. 

This also provides a second route to viewing the Usage page for each piece of content. Click any content name in the tab to open its individual usage page.

The Admin Metrics view: every piece of content in the account ranked by resource utilization.

On an organization plan, publishers get this exact experience for their own content, and account admins see the same pages across every publisher's content in the account. For a team running dozens of apps and documents, admins can spot surges in user activity, catch content that's consuming too many resources, and retire what no one uses. Click any title to dig in further. 

Right-size compute for each app

These metrics show you where each piece of content is over-provisioned. Click the Settings gear icon and then the Compute tab. You'll see two sliders, memory and CPU, with upper limits that depend on your plan. This page also has an information box that details expected usage credit consumption based on your selected resources.

Compute settings for an app currently allocated 8 GB of memory and 2 CPUs.

The usage charts tell you where to set them. Take the app above, allocated 8 GB and 2 CPUs:

• Memory never climbs past 2 GB? Bring the slider down to 4 GB with room to spare.
• CPU never puts the second core to work? Give it back.
• Click Republish and the new settings take effect.

The Compute screen already gives you control over how much to commit to each piece of content: a short static document can stay at the minimums for the initial deployment, while a complex Shiny or Streamlit dashboard crunching large datasets warrants more memory and cores. Usage metrics enable you to plan those commitments around actual consumption and load spikes

You can plan with these settings, too. If you know a higher load is coming for launch day or a month-end reporting rush, raise the limits ahead of it and bring them back down when traffic returns to normal.

Connections and processes have their own dials in Settings > Runtime: worker processes, connections per worker, load factor, and timeouts. These matter most for apps serving many people at once; the Runtime documentation covers each one.

Get started

If you already publish to Connect Cloud, these usage metrics are available to you today. Click the Usage icon on any piece of your content, or head to Admin > Usage for the view across everything you publish. The User Guide has details on Usage, the Content Usage Page, and Account Usage.

If you haven’t tried Connect Cloud yet, create a free account and start sharing your work in minutes.