Showing Average Costs in Apptio BI

Question

Hi - I'm wondering if there's a way to show an average cost of an item over a set of periods in Apptio BI.
One use case for this we have is to show an average monthly cost for a business unit, averaged over the financial year to date.
I've been able to sort of do it using a calculated metric (see below), but this isn't a practical solution as the denominator (ie number of months in year to date will need to be updated every month.
Thanks in advance!

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Accepted Answer

Hi Tom, thanks for reaching out. Unfortunately, we do not support averaging at this time in Apptio BI. We are currently monitoring this, as we look to expand our Calculated Metrics capabilities in the future, so users can create more interesting metrics using operations like Count, Sum, Avg, Min, Max, etc. It really does help us to understand your use cases, so thank you for providing that.

You did find a pretty good workaround, but I would recommend creating the metric in ApptioOne - Cost, then exposing it via Data Source Management in Apptio BI, so you can report on it. There are also already a good amount of average monthly metrics in ApptioOne - Cost today, so you might not need to create it from scratch.

Let me know if this helps.

cc: @Matt Wroblewski @Matt Gerow

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