Microscope: Explore individual data points in your charts

Amplitude's Microscope feature enables you to dig deeper into a specific data point's users. Just hover over a data point in your chart, and a pop-up offers you up to six options (depending on your Amplitude plan) for further inspection.

This article explains how to use this feature and interpret the information provided in the View User Streams and Show User Paths sections. 

Feature availability

This feature is available to users on all Amplitude plans. See the pricing page for details.

Before you begin

• Microscope streams only highlight events selected in the chart's Events Module that occur during the date range selected.
• View Groups and Download Groups are only available to Enterprise customers.
• Microscope isn't available in the Pathfinder section of the Event Segmentation chart.

Use Microscope

To bring up the Microscope menu, simply click on a data point in any supported chart.

From here, you can:

• Add an annotation to your chart on the specific date of the data point you've selected, such as the dates of a feature release or a marketing campaign. Annotations appear as purple vertical lines in your chart, and they can be removed in your project's Settings page. There are some limits to annotations:
  • Only users with Admin or Manager permission levels can create annotations.
  • Chart-specific annotations are only available for Event Segmentation and User Sessions charts.
  • Annotations don't support public links and aren't accessible in dashboards or notebooks.
• Create a release. A release represents a change in your product. See this Help Center article for more information on releases in Amplitude.
• Create a cohort of the users that make up the selected data point, which you can then further analyze by applying this cohort to other charts in Amplitude. When you apply a group in the Segmentation Module, you can also create a group cohort from here.
• View a list of all the users in the selected data point. Click a user ID to open that user's profile in the User Activity tab. If you are an Enterprise customer with account-level reporting, you can also use Microscope to view the groups in a data point. Click any group to see a list of users in that group, in the User Activity tab.
• Download all the users (up to 1 million) that make up the selected data point, in the form of a .CSV file. This file also contains each user's most-recently sent user property values.

Show user paths

This option runs a Pathfinder Users report based on user activity for the selected data point. This is useful for when you want to quickly see the top event paths users take after a specific event or on a particular day.

For example, you can view users who dropped off after a specific event or step in a Funnel Analysis chart and see what were the top paths the dropped off users performed, instead of successfully completing the funnel.

To analyze what users are doing instead of triggering the Purchase Song or Video event in the funnel chart below, click the drop-off data point for the Purchase Song or Video event and use Microscope's Show User Journeys feature to view the top event paths users take after the Select Song or Video event:

By showing user paths, it becomes clear that after triggering the Select Song or Video event, many users trigger either the Download Song or Video event or the Play Song or Video event. Now we can hypothesize ways to improve the product's purchase flow—like sending users an in-app message to purchase a subscription at exactly the right moment.

View user streams

When using Microscope in an Event Segmentation chart, you can see individual user streams in aggregate by selecting View User Streams. All a user's events within the date range of the data point are visible here, as well as:

• Up to 25 events prior to the beginning of the time range.
• Up to 50 events after the start of the time range.

If you have a specific event selected, it's highlighted in the user's stream. You can also choose to show certain event properties as well. Click a user ID or any event in a user's stream to view their profile in the User Activity tab.

View Session Replay from a user's event stream

If you are a Growth or an Enterprise customer with the Session Replay add-on, you can launch a session replay from Microscope in the following Amplitude charts: Event Segmentation, Funnel Analysis, Journeys, and User Sessions.

While using Microscope in a supported chart, click on View User Streams. Check the Streams with session replays box in the modal that appears. Then click Play Session in the event stream to play the events directly below it. Check out more about the Session Replay feature, and learn about restrictions in the supported charts, in this help center article.

Explore conversion drivers

In a funnel chart, click into any step after the initial event to enable the Explore Conversion Drivers feature. This allows you to explore events triggered between funnel steps for converted and dropped-off users.

For more information, see Amplitude's conversion drivers feature.