The Easy Insight Blog

Sendgrid Reporting with Easy Insight

2010-06-06T01:01:00.000-07:00

One exciting fellow Denver company that recently closed a series A of funding is Sendgrid, a provider of reliable email delivery that works particularly well for systems running in the cloud. Because the spam blacklists aren't big fans of you running email servers on Amazon EC2 or other cloud systems, it definitely helps to use an external system like Sendgrid.

So with that in mind, another of our new connections in Easy Insight is Sendgrid, accessible at http://www.easy-insight.com/solutions/SendGrid.html! If you want to report on your email delivery stats, this connection can help you get started. In particular, with our own use of Sendgrid, we do a lot of correlation using the Category field in Sendgrid to tie metrics back to other information--understanding metrics on that Category basis in relation to other fields that we're using for joins.

Pivotal Tracker Reporting with Easy Insight

2010-06-05T10:35:00.001-07:00

One agile software development system that's become quite popular recently is Pivotal Tracker. However, Pivotal Tracker doesn't really have a lot of in depth reporting or analysis capabilities, nor really anything in the way of scorecards.

So to step into the need, Easy Insight offers a connection to Pivotal Tracker data accessible at http://www.easy-insight.com/solutions/PivotalTracker.html. This connection lets you build scorecards and reports on your projects, iterations, and stories in Pivotal Tracker. And since Pivotal Tracker is a free product, we figured we'd make our connection to Pivotal Tracker free as well, so give it a try and let us know what you think!

Key Business Metrics

2010-04-13T23:14:00.000-07:00

Fred Wilson made a post at http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2010/04/key-business-metrics.html a few days ago about how companies should be tracking and publishing their key business metrics internally that got me thinking at both a conceptual and a "why Easy Insight matters for this" level about that topic. We have our functionality around KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) that enables users to create scorecards of key business metrics, with default sets of KPIs created for the connections you establish--Basecamp, Google Analytics, and so on.

What we haven't really delved into is that set of 4-6 "big metrics" that apply across the entire business...our typical scorecards to this point have been more along the lines of a Marketing scorecard, a Sales scorecard, and so on. Trying to boil things down into 4-6 metrics ended up as an interesting thought exercise for me--in the case of our internal metrics, I came up with this list:

1) # of Unique Visitors to the Application in Time Period
2) # of Distinct Users Active Within the System in Time Period
3) Expectation Adjusted Dollars in the Pipeline
4) Revenue Received in Time Period
5) Todo Items Completed in Time Period

The time period's a bit hazy for me at the moment, probably ranging from 7 days for #2 to 90 days for #4. From there, we can establish the connections to the underlying reports that will help analyze those metrics--identifying conversion rates on visitors from different sources, figuring out what may have helped produce an active user, and so on. I'll be exploring this concept a little more with future blog posts, but wanted to just get anyone else's thoughts at a higher level around those numbers. If you had to define 4-6 metrics for your business, what would they be?

Burndown Charts

2010-04-13T23:04:00.001-07:00

One of the things we haven't supported to the extent we needed in the past was true burndown charts on Basecamp data. Well, we've remedied that! If you want to look at a burndown by todo list or responsible party, all you need to do is install a connection to Basecamp in Easy Insight, then go to the Report Exchange at https://www.easy-insight.com/app/#page=exchange&view=1&display=0&subTopicID=8. You'll see that the first two entries there are Burndown Charts. Clicking on Burndown Chart by Responsibible Party gives you a sample of this report against your data. You can click "Add to My Data" to save the report off for future reference, always being updated against your newest Basecamp data.

Introducing lookup tables (part 2 of changes!)

2010-04-08T23:06:00.000-07:00

Our newest functionality comes in the form of lookup tables, which allow you to augment your existing data with additional fields. Conceptually, you define a lookup table as adding one new field to a data source, based off of a value in an existing field. Let's build an example off of Highrise. For this example, we're going to build a Description field, based on Company name. We'll start by clicking the Lookup Table button on the My Data page, and filling in the information from there:

With these fields entered, clicking Save opens up the Lookup Table editor window. Here, we can fill in a Description for each Company in our Highrise implementation. This Description field now becomes available to us in the report editor, just as if the data was in Highrise itself. Using this functionality, you can extend any data source, greatly increasing the flexibility and range of your reports in Easy Insight.

Busy weekend of changes, part 1

2010-03-28T20:55:00.000-07:00

Busy weekend of changes that I'll need to spend a day or two explaining over a few posts, but first, some of the smaller changes:

1. Basic accounts are now able to create a single Group, making it much easier to collaborate across a few users in your account. You can add data sources, reports, and scorecards to the group to quickly share insights and stay in sync.

2. We've added a Zip Code field type. If you want to create heat maps on data with zip code information, you can create latitude/longitude fields, associate those to the zip code field, and you're off and running!

3. Lot of general usability tweaks, minor bug fixes, and aesthetic improvements here and there.

Part 2 coming with the bigger changes soon...

Excluding items with filtering

2010-03-26T13:52:00.001-07:00

So you're building a report in Easy Insight and you want to restrict things down a certain subset of data, and you're a little confused about how to proceed...here's how you solve the problem! Let's start with a sample list:

Here, we have a list of the milestones in Easy Insight's Basecamp implementation. If we want to explicitly exclude certain milestones from the list, we can select those milestones and click the Exclude Data button on the Filters. This action creates a filter designed to keep those particular items out of the report.

As you drag further fields onto the report, it will continue to apply this filter to the data--if you drag on todo lists, for example, it will not show those todo lists which belong to the excluded milestones.

Introducing Personas

2010-03-23T20:15:00.000-07:00

For accounts at a Professional level and higher, we now have functionality around Personas for helping to manage your users. For example, if your executive user sees the API page on Easy Insight, he or she is probably going to be pretty confused. At the same time, you probably don't want developers seeing the KPI page. To accomodate these use cases, you can configure Personas under the Account Management tab (if you're an admin user). We'll be gradually expanding the set of capabilities you can configure here, but for the time being, you can control access to the different tabs and to some of the functionality on the My Data page.

Still alive...

2010-03-22T09:37:00.000-07:00

Just bad at blogging at a regular basis. We've been cranking away on adding functionality, improving quality, and everything else that's necessary to make Easy Insight a successful product. In particular, we've added new tutorial experiences to try and improve the ease of starting up with Easy Insight--when you define a new connection or when you define a KPI, you'll get a taste of the new tutorial system.

Basecamp Links

2010-01-04T08:03:00.000-08:00

One of our new features around Basecamp reporting is the ability to link directly into Basecamp itself to quickly take action on what you find in your reports. For example, let's take a basic report that shows Todo List Items and how many items are open per todo list:

With the new functionality, you can quickly jump into the specific page of that Todo list on Basecamp. To do it, hold down shift and left click on the Todo List name:

If you select the "View Todo List in Basecamp" option from the popup menu, you'll jump directly into your Basecamp page, going to that specific todo list. You can use these prebuilt links to quickly take action on what you find in the course of your reporting and analysis. For the moment, you can jump directly to todo lists and to projects.

Introducing the Connection Exchange

2009-12-21T12:49:00.000-08:00

As part of establishing Easy Insight as a great platform for quickly connecting to a wide variety of reports, we've created the Connection Exchange as a way to quickly look at reports built by other users on given connections, and add those reports to your own account. For example, you can look at reports built on Google Analytics, and if you find them interesting, go ahead and add them to your own web analytics.

If you create a report that you think others would benefit from, just check off "Connection Visible" in the report editor and save the report. It's as easy as that!

Creating a Visits Gauge for iGoogle

2009-10-20T09:59:00.000-07:00

One key philosophy we've taken with Easy Insight is that there are a lot of other dashboard products out there--we don't need to be another. Instead, we set you up with the facilities to view Easy Insight reports in the context of other dashboards. For example, let's walk through how you can build a simple gauge showing how many visits come in the last week to your website, as tracked through Google Analytics, and how you add that gauge to your iGoogle page.

Start by pulling up your Google Analytics data source in the report editor. Choose the Gauge report type and drag in Visits as a measure. Plug in a maximum value for the gauge and you'll see the gauge image update with where you're at relative to that maximum value. Save the report, then click over to the Export tab and click on the iGoogle button. You'll be linked over to iGoogle, where you need to confirm addition of the widget to your dashboard. Once you've done that, you'll see the widget appear on your iGoogle page, giving you an ongoing view into your visitor count!

Introduction to the Easy Insight API

2009-10-20T09:27:00.000-07:00

There's a vast spectrum of potential data out there--we try to make it as easy as possible to instantly pull data from common sources, but there's far more out there than we've ever going to be able to build for. To make our system as extensible as possible, we offer a data API that allows you to publish in your custom data. This API is delivered through SOAP, secured by basic authentication. We do offer a WS-Security API as well for Professional and higher accounts, but for this discussion, I'm going to stick to basic auth.

You can take a look at some information on the API at https://www.easy-insight.com/app/#page=apis. Conceptually, there are two APIs offered by Easy Insight, the Unchecked API and the Validated API. The Unchecked API is the quick development API. If you pass in a data source name of XYZ with a string field called Customer and a number field called Revenue to the Unchecked API, it will go ahead and dynamically create a data source for you called XYZ with a grouping called Customer and a measure called Revenue. Meanwhile, the comparable use of the Validated API would require that you already have a data source called XYZ, with a Customer grouping and a Revenue measure, and would reject any web service calls you made that didn't match with this signature.

From a quick development perspective, the Unchecked API is great for getting prototype code up and running in no time. However, for production code, you'll want to use the Validated API--it reduces the risk of error, and does have better overall performance. Further examples on the blog will show the use of both APIs.

Analyzing Tags in Easy Insight

2009-10-20T09:08:00.000-07:00

Given that one of the common patterns of Web 2.0 application is the concept of tagging, Easy Insight set out to make sure you could perform meaningful analysis on the basis of tags. One example of the power of what you can do here is with the use of 37signals Highrise, a CRM application similar to Salesforce. For any company in Highrise, you can add arbitrary tags to the company. For example, in our internal use of Highrise, we tag each customer based on where in the sales process that customer stands--Lead, Opportunity, Prospect, and Customer.

Pulling the Highrise data into Easy Insight, we can quickly create a list by dragging in Tags and Total Deal Value. By itself, this isn't necessarily too useful--we don't care about the data grouped by sets of tags. Instead, we want to see data grouped up into the various sales categories, and ignore any tags outside of that grouping. To accomplish this, start by clicking on the edit button on the Tags field and check "Expanded." This will split out all groups of tags, as seen in the next screenshot:

Now we want to restrict it down to a certain set of tags. Click over to the Filters tab, then multi select the set of tags you want (in this case, doing Lead, Opportunity, and Customer). Click on the "Filter Data" button in the Filters tab to restrict data to these three values.

Just like that, we've created a subset of our Highrise deal activity grouped up by a certain set of tags, dramatically expanding the scope and capabilities of our reporting on Highrise. You can use the same functionality for any other application or data set with tags to quickly apply the power of business intelligence to the typical Web 2.0 tagging concept.

Creating a Personalized Todo List in Basecamp

2009-10-20T08:29:00.000-07:00

One useful report to create in Basecamp is a simple list focused around the particular todo items assigned to you. You can start by dragging the Content field into your list to get the names of todo items. Next, click on the Filters tab. Drag in Completed, set it to false, drag in Responsible Party, and set it to yourself. Just like that, you have an ongoing view into all of your particular todo items. You could easily add further filters around milestones and projects to further pare down the particular list to key todo items.

Using the Solution Exchange

2009-10-15T15:34:00.000-07:00

We're trying to make it as easy as possible for you to ramp up with the right reports, whether you're using Google Analytics, Salesforce, Basecamp, or whatever else through Easy Insight. One of the new options we offer for these purposes is the Solution Exchange, reachable at https://www.easy-insight.com/app/#view=1&display=0&page=exchange .

Here, you'll see reports that other users have created based on different third party integrations offered by Easy Insight. As I post this, what's there now are two reports I've built for Google Analytics. One provides a treemap showing a hierarchy of Source -> Visitor Type...this helps you understand how much repeat traffic is coming in from certain referrals, and how much new trafic is coming from those referrals. Another is a crosstab splitting out traffic by Operating System and Browser--which combinations are the users hitting your site using?

To pull in either report, simply click on the report name in the exchange. It'll automatically pull up the report against your particular installation of the solution, with an added bar across the top asking if you want to save the report off to your My Data page. Click Save, and you'll be able to reuse or edit the report as you desire!

If you build a report yourself that seems useful, you can add it to the solution exchange by simply checking the "Solution Visible" checkbox in the report editor and saving the report. It'll be available to others to apply to their own data at that point!

Composite Reports

2009-10-15T13:31:00.001-07:00

One of Easy Insight's strengths is the way that we enable you to report across multiple data sources. To provide a concrete example of how this can help your business, let's take the example of matching your referral sources from Google Analytics to custom business data from a spreadsheet.

First off, let's create a simple List report in the report editor, dragging in Source as the single field:

This gives us the list of where people have come from to visit our website. Next, let's click over to the Export tab and click on "Export to Excel." This will give us a nice little spreadsheet to start with as the basis for our second data source.

After saving and opening that spreadsheet in Excel, we'll go ahead and introduce a second column, Category. We're going to use this second column to group up the different sources based on what type of category they fit into--Facebook and Twitter referrals into Social Media, Google referrals into Search, and so on.

We'll go ahead and save off that spreadsheet, then return to Easy Insight, click over to the My Data page, and click on Upload File. Go ahead and choose the spreadsheet you created and upload it. This creates a new second data source containing those two columns, Source and Category.

Now it's time to join the two data sources--Google Analytics and our Source List, as I opted to call it. To do this, select the two data sources in My Data and click on Combine Sources. It'll take a minute or two to perform auto discovery, at which point you should see:

You can save the resulting data source off and open the report editor on the source from the report editor to begin creating reports on the combined data. You'll see that fields from both data sources are now available under folders in the field list on the left hand side. You can drag these fields together to create reports on the combined data, as easily as if it were just one data source!

Filtering with Easy Insight and Google Analytics

2009-10-15T13:20:00.000-07:00

One of the biggest strengths of Easy Insight is the ability to easily slice and dice the data through ad hoc filters. Starting from the perspective of the report editor on Google Analytics:

In this report, we've dragged Browser and Visitors into the list to the right, the default report type. You'll notice that there are a set of tabs in the report editor along the top of the screen, one of which is Filters. By default, when you're using Google Analytics, there will be a time range filter. This filter defaults to showing you data for the last week. You can change this filter in a couple of ways. First, you can change the entry in the combo box to something else, say, the last month, to see the last month's data instead.

You can also change the filter type entirely to create something with a little more flexibility. Click on the Edit icon next to the filter to pop up the edit window:

Go ahead and change the dropdown here to "Fixed Date Range" and click save. You'll see that the filter changes over to give you a slider, with date pickers on either side of the filter. You can adjust this around to give you a particular time window and perform various types of historical analysis.

Next, we can add an entirely new filter. Just as you can drag fields from the left hand list into the report to create ad hoc reports, you can drag fields into the filter tab to create ad hoc filters. Try dragging operating system into the filters tab:

You'll see that you're given the option of creating three different types of filters here. Combo box filters give you a single selected value, multi value filters let you restrict reports down to certain subsets of values, and pattern filters let you apply wildcard and regular expression filtering on strings. For this example, let's stick to doing a combo box filter. The result of releasing the field in the filter box is a combo box containing all of the operating systems that have visited your site. You can change this entry to change the results in the report.

You can easily apply new filters or change existing ones to quickly slice and dice your Google Analytics data in Easy Insight, gaining new levels of insight into how people are visiting your website, following your advertisements, and everything else that Google Analytics offers!

Intro to Google Analytics and Easy Insight

2009-10-15T11:43:00.000-07:00

One of the quickest paths to value offered by Easy Insight is our integration to Google Analytics. If you already have a Google Analytics account set up, you can get started by simply navigating to the Google Analytics solution page at https://www.easy-insight.com/app/#solutionID=12 . When you click Get Started, you'll first be redirected to Google to grant Easy Insight access to your Google Analytics account. Once that's done, you'll be redirected back to the solution page on Easy Insight. You can click Install this Solution to go ahead and add the data source to your account.

At this point, you'll see a simple line chart offered by default. You can click Edit this Report to jump into the report editor and start your own ad hoc reporting on the data. If you want to try using other reports that other users have built, you can navigate to https://www.easy-insight.com/app/#display=0&page=exchange&view=1 and click on any of the reports there to add them to your data source. Further blog posts will go into more detail about what all you can do here, but this should give you that first start!

Quickly Navigating through Easy Insight

2009-09-24T14:55:00.000-07:00

You can easily jump to data sources, reports, and KPI trees in Easy Insight by using the Quick Navigation button or key stroke. If you click on the Find icon in the upper right corner of the normal screen or hit "Ctrl .", the following window will pop up for you:

You can type in data source, report, or KPI tree names at this point, cursor or mouse down in the list, and click on the name to jump right to the appropriate page. Makes navigating to the data you want much easier!

Improving application quality with Easy Insight and YourKit

2009-09-24T14:04:00.000-07:00

Easy Insight is a flexible enough system that you can end up using it for a wide, wide variety of purposes. For example, you can use it in combination with profiler output on software development to collaborate across a development team on improving application performance. Internally at Easy Insight, we use YourKit Java Profiler. In particular, we often look at our JDBC performance, as shown in the following screenshot:

You can upload this data into Easy Insight by choosing the Export option from YourKit under the File menu and saving it as a CSV. From there, go to Easy Insight, My Data, and click the Upload File button. You can choose the saved CSV from there and add it to Easy Insight as a new data source:

From a simple collaboration perspective, using Easy Insight for your profiler data helps to share it across a team, instead of emailing CSV files back and forth. You can filter down on particular problematic queries or other hot spots, save reports focusing on those problems, and see how the reports change as you make fixes and other improvements.

Using hierarchies

2009-09-24T12:05:00.000-07:00

So you have a bunch of data on a spreadsheet or on some other data source, and you want to start really slicing it in different ways. One concept that's standard in business intelligence is hierarchies. Easy Insight lets you easily define hierarchies, either at a data source or a report level. Let's walk through how you might do that:

If you hit the public data source of "Colorado 14'rs" you can see that there are two fields available under 14er Mountains, Mountain and Mountain Range. You can double click on the fields or drag them into the list to add them to the report, as shown:

A better way to look at the data can be from a perspective of a high level and a low level--for instance, seeing things at a Mountain Range level, and allowing drilling into the Mountain level. To accomplish this, we're going to define a hierarchy. Click over to the Data tab and you'll see a few buttons. The fourth button over is the "Create Hierarchy" button:

Click on that and you'll get the Create Hierarchy window. You can drag in different groupings here to define your hierarchy. You can drag groupings up and down in the list to reorder as well:

Once you've created that new hierarchy, you can drag it into a report just as you drag any other field. The difference is that you can do shift-left click to navigate up and down within the hierarchy:

Hierarchies give you a great way to navigate across larger data sets, group data at different levels, and gain a more detailed understanding of your data!

Creating a Custom Stock Index

2009-09-22T20:34:00.000-07:00

The Easy Insight integration with Google Spreadsheets offers some fun possibilities for creating rich analysis based on the various functions that Google offers. For instance, you can pull stock data from Google Finance into a spreadsheet. You can add further columns from there to define additional ways to slice the data--for instance, I've added Industry for each stock in the spreadsheet below:

Once you've got a spreadsheet you're happy with, jump over to Easy Insight. Note that you can do all of this with a Free account, if you don't have one yet. Click on Google Spreadsheets and hit Connect. If you haven't set up a connection with Google and your Easy Insight account, you'll be forwarded over to a page to grant Easy Insight access to your spreadsheets. Once that's done, you can choose the created spreadsheet from the tree and hit the Analyze button to create a new data source.

From there, you can start dragging columns into a report to create whatever sort of analysis you want on the stock data and the additional groupings you chose to add in the spreadsheet:

And the best part is, the data within Easy Insight will automatically update whenever you look at the report, since the spreadsheet offers a live connection to Google Finance! All sorts of possibilities for what you can create in the way of mashups with this...

Getting actual updates going...

2009-08-19T08:14:00.001-07:00

Haven't had a lot of activity posting so far as we scramble to get everything in place. Videos for Tour button coming up soon, but would love to get thoughts from people as they see what we offer now!

Latest changes...

2009-04-12T12:55:00.000-07:00

Welcome to the Easy Insight blog! Here, you'll find discussion of the latest changes to Easy Insight, along with more general discussions on business intelligence, business optimization, random fun with data, and anything else that seems relevant.