How to Create an IT Dashboard in Google Analytics

Google Analytics is often seen strictly as a marketing tool, but its data is equally powerful for monitoring the technical health and performance of your website. Creating a dedicated IT dashboard can help you spot compatibility issues, track errors, and find performance bottlenecks before they impact your users. This article will walk you through exactly how to build one in Google Analytics 4.

Why You Need an IT Dashboard in Google Analytics

Before jumping into the setup, it’s worth clarifying why you should spend time creating an IT-focused view of your analytics data. Unlike a marketing report that tracks conversions and campaigns, an IT dashboard watches over your site’s vital signs.

• Early Issue Detection: A sudden drop in users from visitors using Chrome on Android? A spike in page-not-found errors? This dashboard makes technical glitches visible so you can act on them fast.

• Performance Monitoring: Spot slow-loading areas of your site or browsers that provide a poor user experience, helping you prioritize performance improvements.

• Centralized Data: It brings key technical performance indicators into one view, saving you the hassle of digging through different reports every time you need to check on site health.

• Resource Savings: Using Google Analytics is free. Building this dashboard gives you powerful site monitoring capabilities without adding another paid tool to your tech stack.

Key Metrics for Your Technical Dashboard

A good dashboard is built on the right metrics. An IT dashboard shouldn't be crowded with revenue or conversion data. Instead, you'll focus on metrics that signal the technical performance and user experience on your site.

Here are the essential metrics and dimensions to track, broken down by what they help you monitor:

User Access and Device Compatibility

• Dimension: Browser. Metrics: Users, Engagement Rate. Is your site working correctly across all browsers (Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Edge)? A suspiciously low engagement rate for a specific browser could signal a CSS or JavaScript bug.

• Dimension: Device Category. Metrics: Users, Engaged sessions. What percentage of your audience is on desktop, mobile, or tablet? Knowing this helps you focus your QA efforts. If a new feature causes issues for mobile users, your numbers will show it immediately.

• Dimension: Screen Resolution. Metric: Users. This dimension helps you understand the most common screen sizes your visitors use. It's incredibly useful for front-end developers aiming to ensure responsive designs look great for the majority of the audience, not just on their own monitors.

Error & Crash Reporting

• Dimension: Page Title (for 404s). Metric: Views. How many users are landing on "Page Not Found?" You can use this report to find and fix broken internal or external links contributing to a poor user journey.

• Metric: Event count for JavaScript Exceptions. A spike here is a clear sign that something is broken in your site's code. This requires a bit of custom setup in Google Tag Manager, which we’ll cover below, but it's one of the most critical reports for any developer.

Website Performance Indicators

One notable change from Universal Analytics to Google Analytics 4 is that an official 'Site Speed' report is not available out of the box. UA had specific reports for page load time and server response time, which GA4 has de-emphasized in favor of user engagement signals. However, low engagement can be a direct symptom of poor performance, making certain metrics excellent stand-ins.

• Dimension: Country. Metric: Engagement Rate. If users in a specific geographic region have a significantly lower engagement rate, it might point to issues with your CDN or specific server performance in that area.

• Dimension: Page Location. Metrics: Views, User engagement, Event count. Identifying your most trafficked pages helps prioritize optimization efforts. Poor engagement on a popular page is a major red flag that warrants investigation for slow load times, rendering issues, or broken elements.

Setting Up Crucial IT Event Tracking First

To build the most valuable widgets in your dashboard, like tracking 404 errors or JavaScript exceptions, you first need to tell Google Analytics how to recognize them. By default, GA4 doesn’t track these. The best way to set this up is through Google Tag Manager (GTM).

How to Track 404 "Page Not Found" Errors

One of the easiest ways to tag 404 pages is by creating a trigger in GTM that looks for the title of your error page.

1. In GTM, create a new Trigger. For the trigger type, choose Page View.

2. Under "This trigger fires on," select "Some Page Views."

3. Set the firing condition to be: Page Title > contains > Page Not Found (adjust the text to match what your site's 404-page title says).

4. Name your trigger "404 Page View Trigger" and save.

5. Now, create a new Tag. Select the "Google Analytics: GA4 Event" tag type.

6. Select your GA4 Configuration Tag. Give the event a name like error_404. You do not need additional parameters here as an event with a name is tracked.

7. Attach the "404 Page View Trigger" you just created to this tag.

8. Save, preview, and publish your container. Now, every 404-page view will be recorded as an error_404 event in GA4.

How to Track JavaScript Errors

This one is a total game-changer for developers. GTM has a built-in trigger to detect unhandled JavaScript errors on your site.

1. In GTM’s Variables section, click ‘Configure’ under Built-In Variables and enable all the Error variables (Error Message, Error URL, Error Line).

2. Go to Triggers and create a brand new one. For the trigger type, select JavaScript Error. Keep it set to fire on "All JavaScript Errors."

3. Name this "JavaScript Error Trigger" and save.

4. Create a new GA4 Event tag.

5. Name the event something standard, like exception.

6. Under 'Event Parameters', add parameters to capture the error details:

   • Parameter Name: description, Value: {{Error Message}}

   • Parameter Name: url, Value: {{Error URL}}

   • Parameter Name: line, Value: {{Error Line}}

7. Attach the "JavaScript Error Trigger" to this tag. Save and publish. Now GA4 will capture the crucial details of any script errors that break on your site. Don't forget, you will need to register those newly created parameters as 'Custom dimensions' if you want to use them in GA4 reporting.

How to Build Your IT Dashboard in GA4 Reports

Dashboard creation in GA4 works differently than in its predecessor. Instead of a dedicated "Dashboards" section, you use the "Library" to create custom Reports and Report Summaries that function as your dashboards.

The goal is to create one "Detail Report" - our IT Performance Report - and then a "Report Snapshot" where we can add summary cards from that report for an at-a-glance view.

Step 1: Create a Custom IT Detail Report

A "Detail Report" is an in-depth report that shows your data in a table and two charts. We’ll build one containing all of our key technical dimensions and metrics.

1. In GA4, go to the Reports section then click the bottom of the menu titled Library.

2. Click on the + Create new report button, and then select Create detail report.

3. You can start from scratch with 'Blank' or select 'Pages and screens'.

4. Customize Dimensions: Click on ‘Dimensions' button. Add dimensions like Browser, Device Category, Screen Resolution, Page Title and your custom 'description', url, line dimensions for the exception event. Set the default you would like to see when you first open the report like Browser. Hit the Apply button.

5. Customize Metrics: Now click on ‘Metrics’ on the right and do the same for them and include metrics like Views, Engagement rates, Users, and Event Count. You can set 'Users' as the default.

6. On the next section at the right sidebar Charts, you can choose what type of graphs you want. Line chart as well as Bar chart. I will select Bar chart.

7. Then click Save. Name your report "IT Health Dashboard" and provide a simple description. Hit Save once more.

Step 2: Add Report to the Navigation Menu

You’ll notice that after saving, your awesome report won’t be on the left nav. To rectify this:

1. Back in Library home, find collections. This area can have one called ‘Life Cycle’. Hit ‘edit collection.’ On the right area you are going to see ‘Create new report’, just find the report you created (IT Health Dashboard) and drag and drop it in there.

2. Hit save and ‘save changes to current collection’. And now you will have it on the left menu on your report area.

Step 3: Create Your 'Report Snapshot'

With your report ready, you now need to create your dashboard. You can select Report Snapshot and add all your Cards which is our widget.

• Click on + Create new report and then select Create report snapshot

• Click on + Add card. You will have a list of cards from the Report you are creating, select what you want and you are ready.

• Select Card and give it a name to Your Cards and apply your changes.

Final Thoughts

Creating an IT dashboard in GA4 transforms it from just a marketing tool into a proactive site health monitor. Taking the time to set up custom reports and event tracking for 404s and JavaScript errors allows you to detect technical issues before they escalate into bigger problems.

This new process of connecting your data source and building reports is where Graphed helps the most. We turn the handling of data connections into easy conversations. Instead of navigating through multiple menus and configurations, you can simply connect your Google Analytics account and just ask: Create a dashboard to monitor JavaScript errors, device performance, and 404s. We generate that for you instantly in a live, shareable dashboard that updates automatically, saving you the time to build and maintain the report so you can focus on the actual fixes.