by PT 8.62
Randall Groncki
A Metric visualization is a big, simple “number tile” that shows one key value, like “Headcount = 3,371” or “Open Positions = 32”. It’s meant for quick-glance KPIs at the top of a dashboard, not for deep analysis.
This example from the delivered Current Headcount Dashboard just simply shows the current headcount.
Extended Example
This blog extends our previous posts on creating an Insights Dashboard. The example for our demonstration is the PeopleSoft HCM Training data: The classes our employees have attended.
Create a Metric Visualization
Our first Metric Visualization is a count of documents in the Source Index Pattern.
Navigation: Home > Reporting Tools > Insights
Insights Navigation: Insights Home > Visualize
Click the “Create Visualization” button.
Choose Type Metric from the Visualizations List
Select the Index Pattern with your data source
Our Metric Visualization Page displays with the default Metric a count of all the documents in our Training Data Set: 241.
This looks good, but we want a better label on our Metric.
Click on the twisty in the Metrics box to open the Metric Options
Leave Aggregation: Count
Add a custom label: “Employee Classes”
Click the Update Button
Click the Options Tab
Scroll to the bottom of the bod to the “Style”
Use the slider to reduce the font size to 50
Click Update
Click the Save button at the top right side of the page.
I like to name my visualizations with the Index Pattern they’re built on and the type and verbiage to describe it.
Done
That’s it.
We created our first Metric Visualization.
Types
In the above Metric, we accepted the default “Count” option in the Aggregation box. There are several other options. The most common I have used are:
- Count
- Average
- Sum
- Min
- Max
The Count aggregation counts documents, or rows of data. Average, Sum, Min and Max all work on a numeric field in your index pattern. It quickly does the appropriate math and displays the value as per the number formatting options in the Index Pattern.
Create a simple Average Metric
Create a new metric using the same Index Pattern.
After the Metric Visualization page appears, change the Aggregation Type to “Average”
The field box opens right below Aggregation selection. Choose “Course Duration”.
Change the custom Label to “Average Class Duration”
Click Update
The average course length is calculated for all courses and displayed with our custom label.
Save the visualization as we did our first example with a descriptive name.
You can format the way the average value displays precision by updating the Index Pattern. See our post “Format Numbers in Insights Dashboards” for more information
Split Groups
Insights allows us to break down the Metric by a field value.
For our example, we will break down the row count by company.
As our previous count example, create a Metric Visualization
Aggregation: Count
In the “Buckets Section on the right, “Add” a Split Group
In the Aggregation box, choose “Terms”
In the field box, Choose “Company”
Click Update and we see our five company counts
We know there are more than 5 companies – Why aren’t they showing?
Only the top five are showing because our bucket “Size” box is set to 5 and Descending. This means that only the top five companies by count are shown.
Change the Size box to 9 and click Update.
Now the top nine companies are showing, but there are still more.
Click on the “Group other values in separate bucket” option and click Update
Clicking on this “Other” group displays the next group of nine in descending value order.
Since these are all the companies in our data set. There is no additional “other”. However, if there were, other would appear again with the new “Other” count.
As before, save this Visualization with a descriptive name to include the dataset name.
Filtering data
We can add a filter to our visualization to calculate only specific data from our dataset based on a field value.
In our case, I’ll create a filter that only allows data for three selected companies.
Create a Metric visualization as we did before. Make the Aggregation “Average” based on the Duration field as in our prior Average Metric.
Add a split rows in the Buckets section to split on the “Company” field. Leave the “Buckets” field equal 5.
You should see something like this:
In the upper left corner, click on the “+ Add filter” link
Select “Company” in the field box
Operator: “is one of“
Click on the “Values” box and select three companies to display
Click on Save.
Now, only those three companies appear in the visualization.
Save as we did before.
Security Effects on Metrics
Depending on your choice of security, the metric only does math on the documents the user has access. If no security is selected or, the user has row level security access to all documents, then all documents in the data set will be included.
However, if a user has limited access to documents in the dataset, the math will only calculate using the documents the user has security access. This may skew the metric values for that user.
Review
Metric Visualizations are extremely easy and straightforward.
Add them to your dashboard to show immediate impact along specific KPIs.
Next
In our next blog and video, we’ll create our first Insights Dashboard
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