What the Cursor team dashboard and Admin API do not show you

First, what it does well

Usage Analytics is available to Team and Enterprise customers, and it collects from clients on version 1.5 or higher. It gives you per-user activity, model breakdowns, and AI Code Tracking, which is Cursor's attempt at the hardest question in this whole category: how much of the code that shipped was actually written by the model.

Nobody has a better view of that signal than Cursor does, because the signal is generated inside their editor. If Cursor is the only AI tool your engineers use, this page can stop here. Turn the dashboard on, it is included in what you already pay, and no third party is going to tell you more about Cursor than Cursor does.

The Admin API sits underneath it and is more capable than the dashboard: /teams/daily-usage-data, /teams/spend, /teams/filtered-usage-events, /teams/audit-logs, /teams/members, plus endpoints for spend limits, repo blocklists and model access. Per-user spend in real currency is in there. That is a genuinely better cost answer than any endpoint agent can give you for Cursor, and it is worth saying so early.

Limit 1: 10 users and 90 days in the dashboard

Filtering supports up to 10 users and 90 continuous days of data.

That is fine for a squad and awkward for an org. A 40-person engineering group cannot be filtered as one cohort, and a year-over-year question does not fit inside 90 continuous days. The API is the answer to both, with its own ceiling.

Date range cannot exceed 30 days. Make multiple requests for longer periods.

So a 12-month backfill is twelve or thirteen calls, paged and stitched, inside a rate limit measured in requests per minute per team. That is not hard. It is also not a dashboard: it is a small data pipeline that someone now owns.

Limit 2: Background Agents and the Cursor CLI

AI Code Tracking has not been implemented for Background Agents, or the Cursor CLI yet.

This one matters more every month, because the work is moving in that direction. Code produced by a background agent or by the CLI is real code that landed in your repository, and AI Code Tracking does not count it. Your AI-authored percentage is therefore a floor, not a measurement, and the gap between the floor and the truth grows exactly as fast as your team adopts the agentic workflows.

Synopt does not close this gap either. Synopt captures Cursor IDE, not Cursor CLI. If somebody tells you their tool sees Cursor CLI usage, ask them to show you the event.

Limit 3: the scoring happens on the engineer's machine

All code signatures are stored on-device. The git commit must be scored on the same machine as the AI code was authored.

Read that sentence twice, because the consequence is not obvious. Author code on your laptop and commit it from somewhere else (a devcontainer, a second machine, a CI job that squashes and re-commits) and the commit is not scored on the machine that holds the signatures. Nothing errors. Nothing warns you. The number is just quietly lower than reality, and you have no way to tell a low number from a missing one.

Limit 4: it is one tool's view of a several-tool team

This is the structural one, and it is nobody's fault. Cursor instruments Cursor. If half your engineers also run Claude Code in a terminal and a few are on Codex CLI, then the questions your CFO actually asks (what is our total AI spend per engineer, which teams have adopted this, where did that API key end up) span three vendors and three different data models. Cursor's dashboard is not a bad answer to that question. It is an answer to a different question.

What an endpoint agent adds, and what it does not

Synopt reads the telemetry each tool already writes on the engineer's Mac, so the comparison is not tool against tool, it is one tool's depth against three tools' breadth. Here is the honest version, including the rows where Cursor wins.

Two rows there are worth arguing with a salesperson about. Cursor gives you per-user spend in currency and Synopt does not, because Cursor's hook payloads carry no cost figure and inventing one would be worse than reporting zero. And Synopt is macOS only, which for a mixed-fleet org is disqualifying rather than inconvenient.

So which should you use?

One tool, one platform, and the question is adoption: use Cursor's own dashboard. It is included, it is deeper on Cursor than anything else will be, and adding a vendor to answer a question your vendor already answers is how observability budgets get embarrassing.

Several tools, and the question is total spend, cross-tool adoption, or what happened to that leaked key: one dashboard per vendor stops working quickly, and the endpoint is the only place where all three tools are visible at once. Most teams that reach this point end up running both, and that is a reasonable place to land.