Auto-refresh

Auto-refresh means a report page pulls fresh data every few seconds on its own, with no user action and no full page reload, keeping the view live.

This capability is meant for live views, where the value of the data is its freshness rather than historical precision, which is why it makes sense in realtime and public-display modes and is pointless in historical reports. The refresh interval is a design choice: a shorter interval feels more live but puts more load on the server and browser, and if the number jumps every few seconds the eye cannot read a trend. What a new user misreads is that auto-refresh does not create new data, it merely shows sooner what the server already collected, so if there is a lag between server and screen, refreshing faster does not erase that lag. For an always-on monitor, this replaces manual refresh so nobody has to reload the page.