Platform Analytics Dashboard Visualization Disappearing

Christopher Sik · 3 hours ago

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 · 2 hours ago

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.