God Mode for Umbraco 17
Explore content relationships, diagnose problems, inspect logs and understand your Umbraco 17 installation from the backoffice.
God Mode started with the questions that come up when you’re maintaining an Umbraco installation. Where is this data type used? Which document types inherit from that composition? What services have been registered? Why is this particular thing doing that particular thing?
You can usually find the answers. Finding them quickly is another matter.
The Umbraco 17 version brings those investigations into the modern backoffice, with a UI rebuilt around Lit and TypeScript, running on .NET 10. It adds a God Mode tree to Settings, bringing the tools together where you’re already working.
Follow the relationships
A content model can make perfect sense when you build it and become rather less obvious a few years later. God Mode helps you explore document types, compositions, data types and property editors, and trace the relationships between them.
It’s useful for the everyday detective work: finding a dependency before changing something, understanding an inherited property, or getting your bearings in a site you didn’t build.
The Reference Graph makes those connections visible across types, templates, data types and block elements. You can also see how many instances of each content type exist. The Element Type Usage view follows elements through Block List, Block Grid, Rich Text and single-block editors, including nested usage — particularly handy before changing a block shared by several parts of a site.
Explore the installation
The package provides searchable, filterable tables for content, media and members, along with search across document types, templates, editors and tags. You can browse templates, partials, controllers, generated models, registered services, Content Finders and URL providers from the same place instead of assembling the picture from several different tools.
The Database Browser shows tables, row counts, columns and declared relationships. The Extension Explorer and NuGet Packages views help you inspect registered backoffice extension manifests and runtime package versions, including package advisories. That’s useful when you’re trying to understand exactly what is installed and how it fits together.
Find problems and follow the logs
The Health & Risk checks surface broken references, configuration drift and cleanup opportunities. Diagnostics bring together configuration values and key system, package and Content Delivery API information, with configurable redaction for sensitive settings.
When something has gone wrong, the Log Browser lets you search Umbraco’s JSON logs and filter by level and time. You can move from a general question about the installation to the relevant error messages without first finding files on the server.
The Overview also checks the latest stable Umbraco and God Mode releases within the running major versions and shows how many listed releases behind the site is. Those checks load asynchronously and can be disabled in configuration.
Make sense of scheduled publishing
A page that didn’t publish when expected can be surprisingly awkward to diagnose. God Mode shows pending and overdue schedules, whether publishing is suspended, and when the scheduled publishing job last ran.
It also exposes the server time zone, UTC handling and Umbraco 17 system-date migration settings. Switching dates between Local, Server and UTC helps you distinguish a scheduling problem from a difference in how a date is being displayed.
Tools for maintenance
God Mode includes utilities to inspect and clear Umbraco caches, restart the application where supported, and edit or delete entries in the umbracoKeyValue table. These are practical maintenance actions, so use them with an understanding of the site and the values you’re changing.
You can hide individual features or whole groups through configuration to keep the navigation focused on the tools you use. Hiding a feature changes navigation; it doesn’t remove access to its API endpoints for backoffice users who have God Mode access.
Optional AI explanations
The separate Diplo.GodMode.AI companion package adds contextual Explain buttons in supported views. It uses a configured Umbraco.AI connection and profile to help explain what you’re looking at, such as a diagnostic result or data type.
The core God Mode package works independently. If you want the explanations, install the AI companion package and follow the project’s Umbraco.AI setup instructions.
Choose the version for your site
The package has had several generations as Umbraco has evolved. Match the package version to your Umbraco installation rather than assuming that the latest release will fit every site.
The God Mode package page links to the current documentation and downloads. For the exact requirements and version history, see God Mode on NuGet.
dotnet add package Diplo.GodModeAfter installation, restart the site and open Settings → God Mode. The project README covers configuration, feature visibility and diagnostic redaction.
Small questions, fewer detours. That’s the idea.