Tautulli — Monitoring and Analytics Dashboard for Plex

Introduction

Tautulli fills a gap that Plex's built-in dashboard leaves open: detailed, long-term playback analytics with alerting. If you run a Plex server for family or friends, Tautulli shows you exactly how your library is being used.

What Tautulli Does

• Displays real-time activity showing active streams, transcoding status, and bandwidth
• Records a full history of every play session with user, device, and quality details
• Generates graphs and statistics for plays by date, user, library, and platform
• Sends notifications via email, Slack, Discord, Telegram, and 30+ other services
• Provides a newsletter feature to highlight recently added media to your users

Architecture Overview

Tautulli is a Python application built with CherryPy as the web framework and SQLite for data storage. It communicates with Plex Media Server via the Plex API, polling for active sessions and reading the server's log files and database for historical data. Notification agents are plugin-based, each implementing a send method for its respective service. The web UI is a responsive dashboard built with Bootstrap.

Self-Hosting & Configuration

• Deploy via Docker, Snap, or run directly with Python on any OS
• Point Tautulli at your Plex server URL and provide a Plex auth token
• Configure notification agents in the settings for alerts on play start, buffer, new media, etc.
• Customize the dashboard with per-library graphs and user-specific views
• Optionally enable the newsletter scheduler to email users about new additions

Key Features

• Granular playback history with filtering by user, library, media type, and date range
• Stream monitoring with transcoding details, bandwidth usage, and quality metrics
• Customizable notifications with template variables for rich alert messages
• Media usage statistics to identify popular content and inactive users
• API for integration with home dashboards like Organizr or Homepage

Comparison with Similar Tools

• Plex Dashboard (built-in) — limited to current activity with no long-term history
• Overseerr — media request management, not monitoring; complementary to Tautulli
• Grafana + Varken — more flexible charting but requires a full Grafana/InfluxDB stack
• Jellystat — similar analytics for Jellyfin; Tautulli is Plex-specific
• PlexPy — Tautulli's former name; Tautulli is the maintained continuation

FAQ

Q: Does Tautulli modify my Plex server or library? A: No. Tautulli is read-only and communicates with Plex via its API without making changes.

Q: Can I monitor multiple Plex servers? A: Each Tautulli instance monitors one Plex server. Run multiple instances for multiple servers.

Q: How far back does history go? A: Tautulli records history from the moment it is connected. It can also import some historical data from the Plex database.

Q: Is there a mobile app? A: The web UI is responsive and works well on mobile browsers. Community apps like Tautulli Remote are available for Android and iOS.

Sources

• https://github.com/Tautulli/Tautulli
• https://tautulli.com