Platform Analytics Dashboard Visualization Disappearing

[Christopher Sik]

I was editing a multi-tab Platform Analytics Dashboard yesterday. I resized a couple of single score widgets on one tab (we'll call it tab 13 for this discussion), saved my changes, exited out of Edit mode, and then navigated to a different tab (tab 2) in the same dashboard.

But tab 2 loaded with the visualization widgets from the tab 13 and not the usual set of widgets which had existed there for over a year.

I checked other tabs in the dashboard and the widgets there all loaded normally. Then I returned to tab 13  and noted that my resize changes had reverted back. So I went back into edit mode, set them again, and saved my work. I refreshed the dashboard and the changes appeared to stick. So I went back to tab 2, only to find that no widgets were displayed. They all just vanished as if they never existed.

I couldn't find them in the library either.  Fortunately, I had a recent version of the dashboard in a sub-prod instance and was able to export the visualizations from that instance and import them into PROD to reconstruct tab 2. There were a couple that only existed in PROD and appear to be gone forever now.

This is not the first time this has happened either. A few months ago a different tab in this dashboard was impacted the same way.

Has anyone encountered a bug like this before?

[Naveen20]

This seems a bug in PA dashboards with many tabs. On recent releases, the core issue is that widget-to-tab associations get corrupted during save operations — particularly after resize/reorder actions. The platform writes the widget instance back with the wrong tab reference, causing widgets to appear on the wrong tab or orphan entirely.

To recover lost widgets: Check pa_m2m_dashboard_tabs and the widget instance tables — the records may still exist with a broken tab sys_id reference rather than being truly deleted. Also check sys_audit for delete events on those records.

[Christopher Sik]

Thankyou, @Naveen20 for the insight and the suggestions. I was not able to find any orphaned widgets on pa_m2m_dashboard_tabs. Nor was there any reference to the dashboard I had the issue with, even though is has dozens of widgets across over a dozen tabs. I was also not able to find entries for the delete events in the sys_audit table. According to the logs, it was as if I never made any changes at all. Which was really surprising as I was active in the platform before and after the event occurred.

[Naveen20 · Accepted solution]

The absence of any audit trail or even records in pa_m2m_dashboard_tabs suggests the Platform Analytics dashboard framework may be storing widget/tab configuration differently than classic PA dashboards — likely in-memory or in a client-side cache layer that gets flushed and rewritten on save rather than making incremental server-side updates to individual records.

So what probably happened is that when you saved your resize changes on tab 13, the platform serialized the entire dashboard state back to the server, but the in-memory representation had already corrupted the tab associations. The save then overwrote the correct configuration wholesale with the corrupted one. Since it was a full overwrite rather than individual record updates, there's no granular audit trail — the platform treated it as a single "dashboard saved" event, not as discrete widget deletes or moves.

This makes the bug significantly harder to recover from and reinforces the update set snapshot approach before any edits. When you open the support case, emphasize specifically that there's no audit trail for the widget loss — that's important for the engineering team because it narrows the defect to the dashboard serialization/deserialization path rather than a simple tab reference mixup. 

[David Ryan]

The visualizations ARE being deleted and can be recovered from the Audit Deleted Records table with a table name = par_dashboard_widget