Glossary
DAU (Daily Active Users)
Daily Active Users (DAU) is the count of unique users who perform at least one qualifying action in a product on a given calendar day.
General definition
DAU, or Daily Active Users, is a high-frequency engagement metric that shows how many distinct users interact with a product each day. Unlike MAU, it is sensitive to day-of-week patterns, campaigns, and outages, making it useful for spotting sharp changes in usage that a monthly metric would hide.
- The DAU/MAU ratio (daily actives divided by monthly actives) measures stickiness: a ratio of 0.5 means half of monthly users return every day
- DAU peaks on certain days of the week or around product launches; understanding that shape informs autoscaling schedules
- A DAU decline over several days is an early churn signal that MAU will reflect only a month later
DAU is distinct from peak concurrent users: many users can be active across a day without being connected at the same moment. The conversion from DAU to peak concurrency depends on session duration and the time-of-day distribution of logins, and is the key input to infrastructure sizing.
In the Ethora ecosystem
On a cloud-hosted Ethora plan, DAU feeds the capacity model that the provider uses to provision shared infrastructure. Customers see the aggregated result in uptime and latency metrics rather than managing capacity directly. Some plans blend DAU and MAU signals to project monthly costs, so understanding your daily usage pattern before choosing a tier is worthwhile.
With a dedicated or self-hosted chat server, you track DAU directly from your own infrastructure logs and use it to drive autoscaling rules or scheduled capacity changes. Ethora’s Chat SDK and backend emit the session events you need to calculate DAU without relying on a third-party analytics vendor, which matters for data-residency requirements in regulated industries. Contact the team to discuss deployment architecture for your user volume.
