Change in page views for admins on 9/24

[Nancy_Webb_CCSF]

In the 9/24/25 deploy Canvas Deploy Notes (2025-09-24) - Instructure Community - 656457 there was a major change in page view functionality.  Instead of being able to view a specified date range of views going back indefinitely, now only the last 30 days are available in the GUI, for other dates in the last year a csv download is required.  Limited to the prior 12 months, not any year.

My first use of page views since the change was for a student whose last page view was just a few days over that month range (36 days ago), so no page views appeared. All I needed to see was whether browser or app was used, but the only way was to create a CSV, which takes a bit of time, then download and open. More work than it used to be.  Luckily another change helped a bit since instead of just showing last login date, it now shows last request (activity) as well so I could choose meaningful dates for download.  That is nice!  An improvement.

What doesn't work for me:

1) Not being able to see the most recent page views in the GUI if it's more than a month prior.  Sometimes I need to know what the student was doing, and could be more than a month ago for, say, a dropped student. Could we be able to choose dates outside of the most recent 30 days?  Can we have a return to choosing older dates to view? 

2) We can no longer see/download page views more than a year earlier.  Sometimes such information is needed.

3) Pagination creates some issues in the GUI. Something I do frequently is search for the time(s) or even if a student visited a page, such as a particular quiz.  The pagination in the GUI means I can't just do a browser search on the webpage to find /quizzes/####. Going from page to page and searching each is too time consuming. You can't skip to the last page if activity was late in the time period. Instead, I must download and search in Excel.  Extra time when I am busy.  I wish we could just scroll down and get more than a page at the same time. Sometimes pagination is useful, and I'd like to hear if others prefer this.  Lots more CSV downloads are in my future.

When the idea process starts really working again I'd like to make an idea about changing this, perhaps giving a choice but meantime, for me this is not a good change. Our page views are extra long because Pronto generates 2 page views every 3 to 4 minutes. 

Do others prefer the new view?

[chriscas · Accepted solution]

Hi @Nancy_Webb_CCSF,

You can check out the  Page Views Changes to Improve Accessibility and Da... - Instructure Community - 656218  blog post from a few weeks ago to see some discussion on this change.  I'm not the biggest fan of the changes either (especially the short notice with the API change).  It seems like the back end of this area takes a lot of processing power and that may be driving some of the change.  I did offer some alternative suggestions (like add a course filter, but maybe an assignment/quiz filter as well) so the returned data is much smaller, which would help pagination too.

Originally the pagination was only returning 10 things per page, and they did at least go to 100 based on our feedback.  I do things very similar to you though and can understand the frustration.  I had bee working during the summer to create a script that would help filter and provide the results we really wanted via the API, but these changes did basically nullify the work.

Hopefully there will continue to be improvements in this area.

-Chris