Interactive Dashboards

Interactive Consumption is a new method for interacting with charts on Dashboards and Visualizer that moves beyond what visual filtering offered in the past. With Interactive Consumption, you can select a data point or multiple data points and any related data points in other dashlets will highlight. Users can enable Interactive Consumption mode by holding down the Windows key for Window based machines or the Command key on Macs and click and drag to visually select an area or point on a chart.

One of the advantages to using Interactive Consumption versus visual filtering is that you have the ability employ visual highlighting, which enables you to interact with data points on a dashlet on a dashboard highlighting any related data points in the other dashlets on the dashboard. Unlike visual filtering which applies the filter to the page and re-renders the results, visual highlighting can be applied to a dashlet without applying a filter. You get real-time response for highlighted points that you can change on the fly. Visual filtering is still possible but you access that action via the Interactive Consumption right-hand click menu.

Visual Highlighting

When selecting a particular area (points, bars, pie, etc...) on a dashlet on the dashboard, you will notice that other dashlets containing related data points will immediately light up to display their related data points. This will be one of the quickest ways to investigate the relationship between data spread across multiple dashlets.

Previously, the only way to explore data points on a dashboard similar to visual highlighting was by visually filtering a dashlet each time to re-render the dashboard and remove filters to return the original state. If you wanted to investigate another data set, you would similarly apply a new visual filter to the dashboard and re-render the entire dashboard again.

Visual Highlighting alleviates the need to render and re-render an entire dashboard by making the data interactive on the fly presenting a completely new level of exploration richness.

Interactive Dashboard Options

Right-click on a dashlet or report to see additional options for an interactive dashboard. You can add:

  • Visual Filters
  • Drill Downs
  • Drill Across
  • Open Link