Insights Come to Self-Service Reporting

At Apptio we’re very focused on helping you make smarter – and faster – decisions about your IT investments. This includes both having the right data at your fingertips as well as quickly understanding why it matters.

To get you the data you need, we built hundreds of reports into our products and also introduced Self-Service Reporting in 2020 to enable end users to quickly create and share the views that matter most to them. In 2020 we also broadly rolled out our Insights feature to have the software tell you when it sees actionable information in the data you should know about. Now, we are bringing these two features together by enabling Insights in Self-Service Reporting.

When we originally released the Insights feature, users were very excited about not having to search for opportunities to cut costs or reduce risk. Apptio has conducted hundreds of TBM implementations at many of the world’s largest organizations and we know what to look for in the data that should matter to an organization. These were the learnings that we coded into the Insights software.

Combining this functionality with the Self-Service Reporting platform brings with it a couple of key benefits:

• The first is the flexibility to instrument the system to monitor any data set or KPI you choose. The system can then identify and notify you when pre-defined thresholds are breached.
• The second benefit is bringing more flexibility to Insights by being able to leverage the broadening datasets, visualizations, and other investments in Self-Service Reporting.

Users of this new functionality are presented with the option to add a custom insight to their SSR-based report.

The user can base the insight on an existing visualization, or they can define the parameters on their own. If the user starts with visuals from the current report – by selecting the ‘Visualization Template’ option – the system will auto-populate additional information such as data source, dimensions, metrics, date range, and filters. If they decide to start from scratch – by selecting the ‘Data Source and Measures’ option – they will need to define these parameters on their own. The user will then be able to configure additional Insight filters and triggers (figure 2).

Once the user has defined the criteria that will trigger the insight, they are ready to save the new insight in their report. This can now be viewed in the Insights tab within Self-Service Reporting including if/when it was last triggered as well as the ability to edit the insight (figure 3).

We are really excited to take this next step in helping Apptio users get the most out of the system in the ways that work best for them. We have a lot more planned in this space for 2021, so stay tuned! If you want to learn more about Insights in Self-Service Reporting, you can learn more here.