Hi All,
I am an LMS admin at my institution (higher ed college, ~12k enrollment), which is new to Canvas, transitioning from Blackbaord Learn. As part of our contract we chose to purchase Intelligent Insights, hoping it would solve a variety of reporting needs. However, as my post title implies, we are finding that frequently the following items recur:
- Data is delayed or otherwise not timely.
- The promise is data is accurate within ~4hrs. However, I have seen it delayed 48+ hours. As an easy example, a course that was published on a Friday at noon might still show as unpublished in an intelligent insight report (ask your data) on Monday at 8am.
- Note: I do find the additional reports like "Students in Need of Attention", "Title IV Financial Aid Compliance", and "Course Readiness" don't seem to have this same issue. My impression is the data source for these reports is not actually the same as ask your data.
- This behavior seems to occur after I release a new term into the system from our SIS and there is a lot of new activity. Since we have only run 2 partial terms in Canvas, I only have limited data, but we have had this issue during the start of both terms. It seems like it takes the intelligent insights database time to catch up to the new data, almost like it's a resource or processing problem on Instructure's end. Unfortunately, this means the data is at it's least accurate when it is most needed for reporting.
- Pinboard reports that were previously working, now simply will not load.
- Error diplayed: "No data was found for your question. View the generated SQL query by selecting "Show SQL" from the "More Options" menu."
- This one is new, started on July 1st 2026. We have had a case open with Instructure since then (case 14616189) , with no resolution and very little responses.
- Ask Your Data performance
- Other than the data being delayed due to item 1, again starting on July 1st 2026, Ask Your Data is performing very poorly. It fails to answer quite basic questions at times, loading for a minute or two, then often resulting in a generic error like "I am sorry, but I could not retrieve the data for this query. Please try rephrasing the question or narrowing the request."
- Example query that produced this error: "Please show me students with no activity for any course related to the term "[Term Name]".
- During this same session, it DID answer: ""Please show me a list of all 2026 Summer E2 Online Courses and their published status." This may imply it is student data tables that are the issue, not courses, unsure.
- It also fails to produce answers for previously asked questions for which I have history of produced answers in prior chats.
- Example Query "What is the data source of enrollment ID [ID] for user [user sis id] in course [course id]?"
- Previous result Summary: "The enrollment (ID [ID]) was created via an API call performed by [First Name] [Last Name] (User ID [User ID]) using a developer key. While the enrollment record itself lacks an SIS batch ID, the system logs confirm it was part of a bulk automated process where multiple enrollments were created in rapid succession.
- Current result: "I am sorry, but I could not retrieve the data for this query. Please try rephrasing the question or narrowing the request."
My IT guy brain says an update may have caused this, so I reviewed the release notes of Canvas Production from the last release on 7/1 and do not see anything mentioned related to intelligent insights. I also reviewed the Canvas Platform Service changelog which has a change from 6/30 that references changes to certain tables ("Catalog") in the API, but doesn't mention intelligent insights in specific.
Posting for awareness. Is anyone else having issues like this, and also not getting support for them?
Thanks,
Brad
