Overview

CircleCI offers two ways to monitor metrics; the Usage API and the Insights Dashboard.

The Usage API requires a user to create a usage report and retrieve the generated usage report via the API. Whereas insights data is available via the Insights API and in the CircleCI UI. 

Usage API

The Usage API, on the other hand, provides data about your usage of CircleCI resources. It's designed to help you understand how you're using your CircleCI plan. You can use it to retrieve data about:

• Total build minutes used
• Total credits used
• Total users
• Total projects and other usage metrics

Insights Dashboard

The Insights API provides data about the performance of your workflows and jobs. It's designed to help you understand how your jobs are performing over time. You can use it to retrieve data about:

• Success rates
• Duration times
• Mean time to recovery
• Throughput
• Total runs
• Recent runs and other performance metrics

In summary, the Insights API is more about performance metrics of your workflows and jobs, while the Usage API is about your consumption of CircleCI resources.

Why do the total credits consumed differ when using Insights and Usage? 

The credits included in Insights are the sum of Docker layer caching (DLC) and compute credits during execution only. Whereas the total credits returned from the Usage API include other credits consumed such as storage and network. You can find a list of all in our documentation here. 

Additional Resources: 

• How to use the CircleCI v2 API to create and retrieve usage reports
• Documentation: Insights
• The Usage API
• Documentation: CircleCI v2 API