Scheduled email digests of your project metrics or dashboards. Choose what each report contains, who receives it, which projects it covers, and when it is sent.
What an email report is
An email report is a saved instruction to send a summary by email on a schedule. It holds a name, a list of recipient addresses, the projects it covers, the numbers it carries, and the day, time and time zone it goes out on. Nothing is kept as a finished document. Every send renders the email fresh from whatever the projects hold at that moment, so a report created today and a report created last year produce the same email for the same period.
Two kinds exist. A project report is assembled by Countly from the metric groups you tick, across every project you list, and is what most reports are. A dashboard report renders an existing dashboard into the email instead, and only appears as a choice when the Dashboards plugin is enabled on the server.
Recipients are plain email addresses. They are not matched against your member list and the people behind them do not need a Countly account, so a report can go to a client, an executive, or a shared inbox that has never signed in. The flip side is that an address on that list receives the report whether or not the person behind it could open the dashboard.
Visibility is a separate question from recipients. Recipients decide who gets the email. Visibility decides who else inside Countly can see the report in this list: Global for anyone with access to the project, Shared for the people and user groups you name, Private for you and global administrators only. Editing and sending belong to the report's owner and to the people it is shared with; a global administrator can also switch it off, preview it and delete it.
How a send time is decided
Countly does not schedule one timer per report. A single job wakes up every five minutes, at two past the hour and every five minutes after that, and asks which reports are due by then. Everything about the schedule follows from that.
The time you pick is an hour and a minute. The form suggests five-minute steps and accepts any minute you type. Because the job runs every five minutes, a report lands up to five minutes after the time it names: one set to 09:00 goes out during the 09:02 run. A daily report is due at its time every day. A weekly report is due only at that time on the weekday you chose. A monthly report is due only at that time on the first day of the month, which is what "monthly" means here.
The time zone is resolved when you save, not when the report sends. Countly compares the zone you picked against the server's own offset and stores the shifted time and weekday that will land on your local time. The field opens pre-filled with your browser's own zone, which is why it is worth setting deliberately for a report going to another country.
Each send is stamped with the hour, weekday and day of month it went out on. A run that finds a report already stamped for the current hour skips it, so a restart or a second worker in the same hour cannot send the same report twice.
Use Cases
Send a weekly digest to a team
A weekly digest is the common case: one email, on Monday morning, carrying last week's headline numbers for the projects a team owns.
Open New report and name it for the audience rather than the data, because the name is what you will scan for in this list later, and what a recipient sees if they unsubscribe. Under Projects, list every project the team is responsible for; a project report can span several, and each one gets its own block in the email.
Tick Analytics under Data to include if the team wants traffic, and add Revenue or Crashes only when someone will act on them. A digest that carries every group is a digest nobody reads to the end.
On the Schedule step, set Frequency to weekly, pick the weekday, then set the time and the time zone to the team's own zone rather than the server's. A weekly report covers the seven days ending on the day it goes out, so a Monday send reads as the week that just closed plus the morning it arrives in.
On the Delivery step, add the addresses, including any that belong to people without a Countly account.
Send it to yourself first with Send now from the row menu, look at what actually arrived, then add the rest of the recipients.
Put specific events in a report
Analytics, Revenue and Crashes are fixed groups. Custom Events are the one part of a project report you choose by name, and they are how a report says something about your product rather than about traffic in general.
Tick Custom Events under Data to include. A second field appears listing the events the selected projects have recorded, and the report carries only the ones you check. Pick the few that name a real outcome, such as a completed signup, a submitted order, or a failed payment, and leave the instrumentation noise unchecked.
The list of available events comes from the projects currently selected, so choose the projects first. An event you check appears in the email only under the projects that record it, and a checked event that none of the selected projects records is dropped from the report.
An event with no occurrences in the period still appears in the email at zero. That is deliberate and often the point: a checkout event sitting at zero for a week is the kind of thing a digest should put in front of someone.
Email a dashboard on a schedule
When the numbers a team needs already live on a dashboard, a dashboard report mails that dashboard instead of asking you to rebuild it as a list of metric groups.
Pick Dashboard report under Report type, then choose the dashboard. The type choice only appears when the Dashboards plugin is enabled on the server; without it every report is a project report and the field is hidden rather than disabled.
A dashboard report replaces the Projects and Data to include fields with three of its own: Dashboard and Dashboard layout on the Setup step, and Dashboard date range on the Schedule step. The dashboard already knows which projects its widgets read, so there is nothing to select. The Dashboard date range is there because a dashboard widget has its own period and the email needs to be told which one to render. The available ranges narrow with the frequency: a daily report can go back as far as sixty days or as little as yesterday, while a monthly one offers only the longer windows.
Dashboard layout decides how the board is arranged in the image the email carries. One per row, the default, stacks every widget into a single reading column. As arranged sends the board as you authored it, with its rows, tile widths, section titles and notes. The choice matters because the email scales the whole image down to the width of an inbox, roughly 536 pixels: a single column arrives at a little over half its size on screen, while a board with three tiles side by side arrives at about a third. As arranged is worth choosing when the arrangement itself carries meaning, and One per row the rest of the time.
If the dashboard is later deleted, or stops being shared with you, the report stays in the list and stops being sendable. Its Data column reads Dashboard not available, Send now and Download PDF are greyed out, and its name no longer opens the preview, because all three ask the server to photograph a board it can no longer open. Edit stays available: point the report at a dashboard you can still reach and the three come back. A report on a legacy dashboard, one made in the previous version of Dashboards, is different. It keeps sending, shows the dashboard by name with a warning beside it, and its warning says the dashboard has to be migrated in Dashboards.
Dashboard layout decides how the board is drawn in the picture the email carries. One per row stacks the widgets full width, which is what most recipients want: the image is scaled down to the width of an email, and three tiles sharing a row arrive too small to read. As arranged keeps the board exactly as you built it, side by side, which is worth choosing when the shape of the board is the point and the recipients will open the image rather than read it in a preview pane. The preview beside the form draws whichever you pick, so the choice can be made by looking at it.
Recipients, visibility, frequency, time and the PDF attachment work exactly as they do for a project report.
Check a report before it sends
Three ways answer "what will this actually look like" without waiting for the schedule: the report's name, and two actions in its row's menu.
Clicking a report's name opens a drawer over the list. It starts with the report's details: its type, projects, data, owner and visibility, then its frequency, send time and recipients. A dashboard report adds its date range, and a report set to skip a period with no data says so. The rendered email follows, built from the same template the scheduler uses, except for a legacy report, whose email still uses the legacy template and whose preview carries a notice saying so. It is the fastest way to see whether the metric groups you picked add up to something readable. Its Edit button takes you straight to the form, with Duplicate and Delete in the menu beside it.
Send now delivers the real email to the real recipient list immediately. Use it to confirm that delivery works and that the subject line reads well in an inbox, and be aware that everyone on the list gets it, so trim the list to yourself while you are still iterating.
Download PDF saves the same rendered report as a file. It is the one to reach for when the report has to travel into a deck or an attachment rather than an inbox.
None of the three touch the schedule, and Send now does not count as the scheduled send: the report still goes out at its normal time. Send now belongs to the report's owner and to the people it is shared with; the preview and Download PDF also work for a global administrator. A report you only receive shows in the list with its name as plain text and both actions unavailable.
FAQs
Why does the list show reports from projects I am not looking at?
Because a report can cover several projects at once, so scoping the list to the project in the top bar would hide most of it. The list shows every report you own or receive across the whole deployment.
Does Send now use up the scheduled send?
No. Send now delivers immediately and leaves the schedule untouched, so the report still goes out at its normal time. It does deliver to the real recipient list, so trim that list while you are still testing.
Why can I see a report but not edit it?
Because you receive it rather than own it. Visibility decides who can see a report in the list; editing and sending stay with its owner and the people it is shared with.
A recipient says they stopped getting the report. What happened?
Most likely they followed the unsubscribe link in the footer, which removes their address from that one report without notifying anyone. Open the report and read the recipient list. Adding the address back resumes delivery.
Why is there no Dashboard report option?
That choice only appears when the Dashboards plugin is enabled on the server. The same is true of the Crashes metric group and the Crashes plugin.
Why did my report not arrive?
Check that it is enabled, that the time and time zone are what you expect, and that you are inside the window the frequency implies, since a weekly report only fires on its chosen weekday and a monthly one only on the first of the month. If all of that is right, the send may have been skipped because the report's creator lost access to one of its projects.
Can I get the report as a file rather than an email?
Yes, two ways. Attach a PDF copy adds the file to every send, and Download PDF in a row's menu saves it on demand.