Hi everyone, last week announced the release of a bundle of releases coming with Apptio BI.
Let's dive into a handful of these releases in our series aimed at getting you up to speed on the what why and how to use these new features. Today - we will focus on reporting on:
Reporting on Cloudability Utilization Data in Apptio BI (See attached Demo for a walkthrough)
This release adds the ability to create visualizations using Cloudability Utilization data in Apptio BI. You can select your Utilization data from the dropdown menu when selecting your data sources. Administrators can manage this in the data source administration tab under settings.
To learn more about the dimensions and metrics that are available in Apptio BI, see Glossary of utilization dimensions and metrics.
This is useful for:
- Creating trended reports that highlight the potential savings achieved through rightsizing efforts
- Creating a visualization showcasing rightsizing savings over previous months
- Assessing the effectiveness of the recommendations and observe the trend of savings over time
Treemaps (See attached Demo for a walkthrough)
We know many of our Cloud users have seen or heard of already familiar with this visualization, but we have brought it to life in Apptio BI to help better compartalize and categorize data in a fresh, modernized way and showcase hierarchical data. Treemaps are particularly useful when you have a hierarchical structure with multiple levels of categories, and want to represent the data in a compact and visually appealing manner.
One of the key characteristics of a Treemap is it's rectangular structure that displays key groupings of your cloud data - drillable data - in one location. We will explore Drills in a later video.
You can create treemaps using the following flexible combinations:
Dimensions (up to fifteen), Metrics (one), and a specified Date Range - with the Treemap icon selected in your view options in the top right-hand corner of your visualization creation window.
Also, the Options tab on the left pane has a range of formatting options to tailor the visualization to your preferences. Specifically, when working with treemaps, the following options are available for customization: Show chart values, Show tooltips, Show category labels, Hiding combined results and adding a Legend to your chart.
In Apptio BI, you may Treemaps useful for:
- Organization: Treemaps can provide a more efficient alternative by visually organizing and representing the data in nested rectangles
- Proportions: Treemaps excel at illustrating the proportional relationships between various parts and the whole. The size of each rectangle corresponds to the magnitude of the data value, allowing for quick comparisons and insights
- Visualizing Patterns: Use treemaps to more easily observe the distribution of a measure across each level of categories in the hierarchy. This allows you to identify patterns, spot disruptions, and understand how the measure varies across various levels
- Utilizing size and color coding: Treemaps provide the ability to show attributes using size and color coding to represent multiple dimensions of data simultaneously, providing a richer understanding of the information
- Identifying patterns, outliers, contributors, and exceptions: Treemaps are effective in detecting patterns, outliers, and key contributors within the data, helping you to quickly identify important insights, exceptional values, or outliers that require further investigation
Explore the various ways you can build these treemaps for specified User Cases and more on our Help Center - here.
Report-level filters (See attached Demo for a walkthrough)
A long requested and anticipated feature we will be building upon throughout this year, the release of report-level filters adds the ability to add a report-level filter in order to filter an entire report. All visualizations and pages in the report will change to reflect the new filter added. Report viewers can interact with the filter when viewing the report, by selecting or clearing values.
Why is this important?
Filters on a report-level help us to more easily manipulate large amounts of data at one time, a useful tool for both viewers and report creators alike, especially those monitoring data over time in established dashboards.
Report level filters are something we have been looking forward to implementing for our Cloud users for some time, and it allows us to provide you with high-quality manipulation techniques to get the most from your dashboards; whether you are monitoring them, subscribing yourselves or others to these dashboards, or using them for executive-level audiences.
To create a report-level filter:
- In the top right corner of a report, select the 3-dots icon > Manage Report Filters.
- From the Data Source list, select the required data source.
- From the Data Version list, select the required data view.
- Select Add Dimensions and then select the dimension you want the filter to be based on.
- Select Apply. The created filter is displayed on a bar below the Report and Insights tabs.
Learn more about Report-Level Filters and how to create them here.
Creating Visualizations using Metrics or Dimensions (solely)
With this release, we have now implemented the ability for users to creating visualization using only a metric(s) or dimension(s), giving you freedom to reduce complexity and build reports faster to cater to your specific use cases.
Why does this matter? Creating these visualization adds speed and flexibility to your report creation process that was previously limited to requiring more complex visualization configurations to create. Users can now view CLoud costs (see below) over a specified period of time in a simple view, which makes data digestible and modernizes the customization process (very much accustomed to Cloud users) for reports within BI.
Please reach out with any questions or comments, and we look forward to hearing your feedback after trying out these features for yourself!
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