Insight Summaries
Insight Summaries work with Visualizer reports displayed as dashlets.
When you open a dashboard, Birst analyzes the data in each enabled dashlet and highlights key trends, significant changes, and unusual patterns. This helps you understand what the data shows without manually reviewing every chart or report.
A dashlet must contain data. If the query that supports the dashlet returns no results, the feature does not generate a summary.
How Insight Summaries work
For each dashlet with Insight Summaries enabled, AI:
- Analyzes the underlying data and query results.
- Generates a concise summary of key findings and trends.
- Detects unusual patterns or anomalies in the data.
- Presents the generated insights directly within the dashlet.
Insight Summaries perform calculations on actual dashboard data to generate summaries and anomaly indicators.
Viewing Insight Summaries
When you open a published dashboard that has Insight Summaries enabled, Birst automatically generates and displays insights for each configured dashlet.
Each enabled dashlet can display:
- Summary: A plain-language description of key trends, comparisons, and significant data points.
- Anomaly indicator: A notification that highlights unusual or unexpected behavior detected in the data.
Generated summaries appear progressively as Birst completes the analysis.
Example: A dashlet that displays monthly revenue might generate this output:
Summary: Revenue grew 12% month-over-month in March, driven primarily by the Electronics category, which increased by 23%. The APAC region contributed to the highest absolute growth.
Anomaly: Unusual decline detected in the Beverages category (-18% month-over-month) despite the overall positive trend. This change may warrant further investigation.
Performance and caching
When Insight Summaries generate content for a dashboard, Birst caches the results to improve performance.
Consider this behavior:
- Initial dashboard loading can take additional time while Birst generates summaries and anomaly analysis.
- Subsequent dashboard loads are faster because Birst retrieves previously generated insights from the cache.
- Cached summaries refresh automatically when the underlying data changes, such as after an ETL process completes.
- Cached content refreshes when summary or anomaly definitions are modified.
- If updated data does not appear in a summary immediately, wait for cache expiration and summary regeneration.
- Insight Summaries are available only for dashlets that were configured and enabled by an administrator or dashboard designer.
- Summary generation and anomaly detection depend on the data returned by the dashlet query.
- Generated insights help users identify trends and outliers during dashboard analysis.