Real time is pretty great, right? It can be a complex tool that helps inform future action or it can be a simple, visceral thing that just feels totally awesome (and watching a page flood with traffic is totally awesome.)

But the issue with real time is that you’re not always on in real time. I mean, really, at some point you’ve got to set aside the stats and go to sleep. And when something happens when you’re not around – from your site going crazy in the middle of the night to  a subtle shift in your traffic when you’re out to lunch – you might miss it entirely. But that stuff is just too important (or too fun) to not see outside the moment.

So we went to the vault and pulled out an idea from one of our earliest dashboards… a way for you to re-watch your past week as if it’s live. Think of it as a a DVR for your site.

To check it out on your page head to the Content View and click the “Today/7 Day” toggle in the upper right. The graph on top will break free from its old 24-hour confines and show you everything that’s happened over the past week.

Now that you’ve got that look, go ahead and drag your cursor over the graph – yup, that’s your traffic at that exact moment and the traffic from the previous week, making it super easy to know if you’re in the middle of something unusual or its just a normal variation. “Context,” it’s totally the best, right?

But okay, ready? The cool stuff is about to really start.

Try this – instead of hovering on that graph, go ahead and click and drag your cursor over a range you want to watch again. We’ll kick you into our “replay” mode and actually show you what your dashboard looked like at that moment in time. That way you can get the kids out of bed, hook up the big screen, and watch how your pages changed, who was sending them traffic, and what specific pages were doing what. Even better you can pause at any time to take a closer look and step through that old data slice-by-slice.

So that’s it! No more wondering exactly what happened while you were away. You can sleep the night away in peace, take an even longer lunch; you deserve it. All you’ve got to do is click a button and you can find out everything you missed. And if you want all the details about how this works, take a look at our FAQs or feel free, as always, to shoot me an email at alex@chartbeat.com.