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How to Create an IT Dashboard in Google Analytics with AI

Cody Schneider•

Tracking your website's technical health shouldn't be a side project. Issues like slow page load times, browser compatibility complications, and broken links directly impact user experience and can adversely affect your conversion rates. This article will show you how to build a simple but powerful IT dashboard using Google Analytics data and how AI can automate the entire process for you.

Why Use Google Analytics for an IT Dashboard?

While specialized tools like Datadog or New Relic offer deep application performance monitoring, they can be complex and costly. Google Analytics, on the other hand, is a tool you likely already have installed. It's free, familiar, and already collecting the core data needed to monitor your site's technical backbone.

You can use the data you already have to answer critical IT questions like:

  • Is the site loading quickly for users in different regions?

  • Which browsers or devices are causing problems for our users?

  • Are visitors frequently hitting broken pages (404 errors)?

  • Is a recent code deployment causing a spike in JavaScript errors?

Building an IT dashboard in GA4 puts these health metrics front and center, turning it from a marketing-only tool into a first line of defense for your site's technical performance.

Key Metrics for Your IT & Technical Performance Dashboard

Before jumping into building the dashboard, you need to know which metrics matter. Focusing on the right data prevents you from getting lost in a sea of numbers. Here are the essential metrics to track, broken down by category.

1. Website Performance and Speed

Site speed isn't just about making users happy, it's a confirmed ranking factor for Google. Slow pages lead to higher bounce rates and lost revenue. Keeping an eye on these metrics is non-negotiable.

  • Server Response Time: This measures how long it takes your server to respond to a request from a user's browser. A slow response time is often the first sign of server-side issues.

  • Core Web Vitals (CWV): Google's user-centric performance metrics. While full CWV reporting is best viewed in Google Search Console, GA4 provides high-level data you can integrate.

    • Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): Measures loading performance. You want this to be under 2.5 seconds.

    • Interaction to Next Paint (INP): Measures interactivity and responsiveness. This recently replaced First Input Delay (FID). A good score is under 200 milliseconds.

    • Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): Measures visual stability. It helps you find pages where elements jump around as they load.

2. User Technology and Compatibility

Your website needs to work flawlessly no matter how someone accesses it. What looks great on a new MacBook using Chrome might be completely broken on an older Android phone using a different browser. These metrics help you spot compatibility issues before they become major problems.

  • Users by Browser: Helps you identify which browsers are most popular among your audience so you can prioritize testing. If you see a sudden drop-off in conversions for a specific browser (like Safari), it could signal a compatibility bug.

  • Users by Device Category: Tracks usage across Desktop, Mobile, and Tablet. If your bounce rate is significantly higher on mobile than desktop, your mobile experience likely needs attention.

  • Users by Operating System: Lets you diagnose issues specific to certain operating systems, like an interactive element that works on Windows but fails on iOS.

  • Users by Screen Resolution: Useful for spotting design flaws. For example, if a specific screen resolution has a very low conversion rate, your call-to-action button might be cut off or hard to see.

3. Errors and Site Health

Technical errors hurt user trust and your SEO. This part of your dashboard acts as an early warning system for everything from broken links to critical crashes.

  • Top 404 Pages: "Page Not Found" errors create a frustrating user experience and harm your SEO. Tracking which non-existent URLs are being requested helps you find and fix broken internal links or implement proper redirects from old pages.

  • JavaScript Errors: JS errors can break key website functionality, like lead forms or checkout buttons. Tracking these is critical, though it requires setting up custom event tracking through Google Tag Manager to send the data to GA4.

How to Manually Build an IT Dashboard in Google Analytics 4

Now, let's walk through building parts of this dashboard directly within the GA4 interface. This process involves creating custom reports and adding specific data cards to get the view you want.

The goal is to assemble widgets for performance, compatibility, and errors into a single, accessible report.

Step 1: Create a Custom Report Shell

  1. From your GA4 property, navigate to Reports on the left-hand menu.

  2. Click on Library at the bottom of the list.

  3. Click the blue + Create new report button, and then select Create detail report.

  4. You can start from scratch or use a template. For this, let's start with the Tech details template. This gives us a head start with some relevant charts.

Step 2: Add Browser & Device Data At a Glance

The "Tech details" template already provides charts for "Users by Browser" and "Users by Device category," which is a perfect start. We can customize this further by changing the visualization or metrics.

  1. Inside the report builder, look at the Cards on the right. You should see charts for Browser, Device category, etc.

  2. You can add a new card by clicking + Add cards. Let's add one to show screen resolution.

  3. Find "Screen resolution" under the "Tech" section and select the table visualization. Click Add card.

  4. You can now drag and drop the cards to rearrange them as you see fit.

Step 3: Create a Widget for 404 Errors

This is a bit more hands-on. We need to create a table that only shows pages that generated a "Page not found" error. This assumes your 404 page has a consistent title, like "Page Not Found" or "404 Error."

  1. Still in the report builder, click + Add cards.

  2. We need a detailed list of page titles and views. In the card selector, find the "Page title" dimension and create a table card.

  3. Click Add card to add it to your report layout.

  4. Now, back on the report overview, click the pencil icon ("Customize report") in the top right.

  5. At the bottom of the right-hand menu, under Report Filter, click + Add filter.

  6. Configure the filter:

    • Select dimension: Page title

    • Match Type: Contains

    • Value: Enter the title of your 404 page (e.g., Page Not Found)

    • Click Apply.

  7. This will filter your new card to show only the URLs of your 404 pages and the number of views they received. Click Save -> Save changes to current report.

After assembling your widgets, you can save this report and add it to your main reporting navigation for quick access. As you can see, this process is powerful but involves a lot of clicks, knowledge of GA4's interface, and manual configuration - especially when you want to ask follow-up questions.

The Future: Using AI to Build Your IT Dashboard Instantly

The manual process works, but it's slow and rigid. If you spot an issue, drilling down for more context requires building more filters or even new reports. This is where AI-driven analytics tools change the game.

Instead of clicking through menus and piecing together filters, you simply describe what you want to see in plain English. The AI understands your request, queries the data, and generates the right visualization in seconds.

This approach transforms reporting from a manual chore into a quick conversation:

  • No Learning Curve: You don't need to be a GA4 expert. If you can ask a question, you can build a report. The AI handles the technical execution of finding and visualizing the correct metrics.

  • Incredible Speed: Assembling a multi-faceted dashboard manually can take a significant amount of time. An AI can build it almost instantly after you type your request.

  • Deeper, Faster Insights: The real power is in asking follow-up questions. Found a spike in 404 errors? Immediately ask, "What were the user's previous pages before hitting these 404s?" to instantly identify the source of the broken links without needing another custom report configuration.

Example AI Prompts for an IT Dashboard

Instead of following the manual steps above, imagine just typing one of these prompts:

Create a tech performance dashboard. Include a scorecard for total users, a line chart of users over the last 30 days, a pie chart breaking down users by device, and a table showing the top 10 browsers.

Immediately after, you could follow up with more specific questions:

Show me my top 10 page not found errors from last week and include their previous page path in the table.

Compare session duration between Safari and Chrome users on mobile over the past quarter.

What's the server response time for users in the United States versus Europe? Show it as a bar chart.

These prompts are specific, analytical, and cut straight to the insight without any manual data wrangling. You're simply telling the tool what you need, and it delivers.

Final Thoughts

Monitoring your website's technical health is essential for protecting your user experience and a strong bottom line. While Google Analytics provides the raw data to do this, building and modifying reports manually is often a slow process - one that gets pushed aside for more urgent tasks. The new generation of AI-powered analytics is changing that entirely.

At Graphed , we connect directly to your Google Analytics (and other data sources) so you can get these critical insights in seconds. Instead of clicking through GA4's interface, you just describe the IT dashboard you need, and our AI builds it for you in real time. It's a faster, more intuitive way to turn your raw data into actionable information that helps you keep your site fast, functional, and reliable for every visitor.