Data visualisation with Focused Insights: Advanced Features

Learn about the different options for data visualisation available in SAP Focused Insights for SAP Solution Manager?

This blog describes some key advanced features of Focused Insights to build the perfect data visualisation for your IT organisation.

The following topics are covered:

• Content Distribution
• Content Creation
• Time manipulation
• Chart Dimensions
• Chart Details
• Rating
• Cache Management
• SLA algorithms

An introduction for the data visualisation options is available here: https://blogs.sap.com/2018/07/02/data-visualisation-with-focused-insights/

You can check chart details in the following blog: https://blogs.sap.com/2018-07-02/data-visualisation-with-focused-insights-chart-description

Content Distribution

Start Option

• The URL parameter fullscreen=true starts dashboard in full screen.
• The URL parameter autoSwitchOnIdle=true starts dashboard in carousel mode.
• The URL parameter RefreshTimer=10 set the refresh timer to 10 seconds.
• The URL parameter ColorScheme is used to set either the Light or the Dark mode of your dashboards.
• The URL parameter AutoSwitchOnIdle=true is used to activate the carousel mode.

Content Creation

You can easily create and maintain dashboards using the copy & paste interface to manipulate dashboards layout, gadgets or queries.

A preview panel provides you with the capabilities to check the content and the visualisation of each gadget before saving your work.

Preview

• Each change in the gadget or queries settings can be visualised in the preview panel:

Gadget / query manipulation

• Queries are managed using the ‘copy‘ icon to place the corresponding query in the Gallery panel,

• The ‘paste‘ icon copy the query from the Gallery panel to the selected gadget.

• You can paste gadgets from the Galleries tab to an empty place holder in the dashboard layout.

Gadget / query reordering

• Gadgets can be reordered directly from the dashboard layout with a drag&drop operation.

• Queries can be reordered directly from the query list from the icon below

Adjust chart scale

• Value Min and Value Max in gadget configuration can be set for scale manipulation of charts.

• Auto adjustmentIn addition, if no scale is set for a specific gadget, the chart will try to adjust the scale automatically based on the dataset values returned by the gadgets queries.For example, line chart with data value range from 80 to 100, the value axis scale will start somewhere near 80.

Time manipulation

Period / Resolution

• The default period and default resolution are defined at the dashboard level in the dashboard settings tabs:

• It can be overridden at the gadget level in the gadget settings tab:

• At runtime, the time dimension can be updated by setting a Global Time Range for all gadgets using ‘Auto/Auto‘ as period/resolution:

• Gadgets using a pre-defined period/resolution will not be affected by the Global Time Range settings.

Chart Dimensions

Main and Drill-down Dimensions

• You can define a drill-down dimension for a main dimension in each query legend as shown below:

• Drill-down dimension are exploited differently depending on the types of renderers:

Stack Column chart 2 label

SLR Table Renderer

SLR Table History Renderer

Bubble Chart

Chart Details

Jump-in Renderer

• Being able to get chart details in different forms is a key capabilities for data analysis.With the Jump-in parameters of the Query Settings tabs, you can either jump to a specific dashboard, a given gadget or a specific renderer.

• Chart details are usually accessed by clicking on the chart legend:

• The chart details are shown in a sub panel accessible from the dashboard bread-crumb navigation.

Rating

Thresholds

Some renderers supports color-rating based on thresholds (yellow and red).

They could be defined at the gadget level:

or at the query level. In this case, the gadget settings is overridden with the queries values.

Rating

The behaviour of the Renderer could be controlled for each query based on the Color Rating parameter:

Renderers

Five renderers adapt their display to the color-rating properties:

• SLR Renderer
• SLR Table Renderer
• Table History Renderer
• Trend Table Renderer
• Donut Chart

Cache Management

Cache validity

From the information button accessible in the gadget menu, you can see the period, the resolution, and the timestamp update of the chart data.

The timestamp is marked with an ‘Asterix’, indicates that the data has been retrieved from the cache.

Hard reload

You have two options to refresh data content for individual charts:

1. The Refresh action will get the data from the cache if the data are still valid for the selected period/resolution.
2. The Hard Reload always bypasses the cache.

Clean Cache

Users with administrators rights can always clean globally the cache from the top-left menu bar.

Tables Manipulation

Renderer

The Dynamic Table Renderer is used to display a set of rows/columns data. The content of the table depends on the type of data provider:

Columns

The attribute Display Attribute is used to:

1. select the columns to be displayed in the table,
2. rename columns headers,
3. and order the columns

For example, the following attributes values:

will produce the following results:

Filtering is supported for each columns by clicking on the column headers.

SLA Algorithms

The SLR renderer is used to display Service Level Objectives compliancy.

The datasets return by singles queries need to be translated in a single value.

5 types of SLA methods are supported by the SLA attributes

• Average: dataset values average.
• Max: maximum value of the dataset.
• Min: minimum value of the dataset.
• Last: Last value of the dataset.
• Sum: Accumulation of all values of the dataset.

Thanks for reading.