Make unique participants the primary participant count in UI reports and API, and provide a guidance on how to interpret each participant number

Feature Requests
1

Cross-posting from API forum by request

We have spent a good deal of time trying to reconcile different participant numbers in various reports and apis (see post referenced above). We’ve discovered confusion around our team about what is included in each report, which resulted in drastically different numbers. The differences are not clearly explained anywhere and the labeling of the participant fields is misleading.

Additionally, both the report in the UI and API emphasize participant numbers that include duplication, and while I’m sure there are cases where that data is useful, I think most organizations want unique participants more often.

I’d like to make three product suggestions:

  1. add the unique count and the total duration of each unique user by meeting into the API.
  2. In the UI, bring the number of unique users forward into the report. Right now you have to go through multiple steps to get the unique users and you have to do it for each individual meeting. I would be willing to bet that most users are assuming that a column in reports labeled “Participants” is the number of unique participants, not the sum of the number of people who joined a waiting room and the number that then joined the meeting. This is very misleading and likely not what administrators are trying to report out. I suggest you do it in reverse. The unique users would be at the top level, and you should have to drill down to see detail like the whether or not the person both joined the waiting room and meeting.

This would also help the issue of having different areas within the admin/dashboard reporting different numbers of participants (yet having both fields just labeled “participants”).

  1. Provide documentation somewhere of what the different reports and endpoints are including and excluding. Your example of the waiting room count is a good one. How would developers or users of the UI know that, when there is a waiting room, the Participants field will count participants who are admitted twice (and presumably, by your description, count people who joined the waiting room but never joined the meeting as 1 participant). It’s very difficult to interpret and explain these participants numbers to others when we report it out.

Thank you