A lab score tells you how a page performed on one machine on one run. Web Vitals tells you what your visitors experienced.
Dashboard: /<org>/<store>/systems/vitals.
Three sources, fused
| Source | What it is | Weakness | |---|---|---| | RUM | Your own visitors, measured live | Needs traffic to be meaningful | | CrUX | Chrome's public field dataset | 28-day window, only qualifying origins | | PSI | PageSpeed Insights, on demand | A lab run, not your audience |
The dashboard does not average them. It picks the most trustworthy source per metric and shows which one it used, so a number is never better than the data behind it.
The schedule
| Job | When (UTC) |
|---|---|
| vitals-aggregate | every 30 minutes |
| vitals-crux-pull | daily, 06:14 |
| vitals-psi-pull | Monday and Thursday, 02:00 |
| vitals-prune | daily, 03:50 |
What it answers
Regression detection (did the last theme change cost you LCP), third-party script impact (what that chat widget costs in milliseconds), and template comparison (which page type is dragging the origin down).
The five tools: getVitalsSnapshot, getVitalsRegression,
getTemplatePerformance, getThirdPartyImpact, runPsiNow.
Which plans
Every plan, including Free: no paid gate on the dashboard.