Imagine you introduce a shiny new Digital Asset Management (DAM) system in your company which can feed all kinds of metrics into the brightly-colored Grafana dashboard hanging on your wall.

What would you track on that dashboard to help you manage, grow and troubleshoot your DAM system? Off of the top of my head, these metrics could be important:

• Users: number of distinct users who logged in at least once during the last 30 days
• Daily users: number of distinct users who logged in at least once on a given day
• User groups: users broken down by group, department etc.
• Assets: total number of assets in the system
• Assets by type, source, owner, status, pool, format, rights etc.: drill-down for important asset types
• Ingested: number of assets newly imported into the system on a given day
• Ingested by source: as above, but drilling down to sources that frequently provide assets
• Ingestion performance: average time it takes to import new assets
• Ingestion errors: number of assets that failed to be imported, or had metadata extraction or preview generation issues
• Asset usage by channel, brand etc.: number of assets published, downloaded, printed, or exported to a production system, broken down by i.e. publication
• Asset reuse: number of assets used more than once
• Asset costs: money spent on licensing assets
• Storage: storage space used by asset files
• File size by type: average size of (high-res) video, image, document files
• Integration performance: number of incoming/outgoing assets or requests per connected system, and average request time
• Popular searches: often-used search terms
• Empty searches: recent searches which returned no assets
• Search performance: average time until search results are shown
• Indexing performance: average time until new or changed data can be found in the search engine
• Collections: how many collections exist, are newly created, how many assets are added to collections, which percentage of users creates their own collections
• Metadata quality: number of assets with incomplete metadata

Anything else?

See also: Are you making this mistake with your DAM metrics? by Asset Bank, Canto reporting, Widen dashboards, and Nate Holmes’ DAM admin’s guide to making it all work.

Update (2018-06-14, thanks Alex):

• Storage: storage growth per day, week, month
• Storage: available space in GB
• Storage: storage growth - availabe space = time to explode :)