Concepts

Basic Concepts

Assets

An asset refers to any resource within your Business Intelligence (BI) environment that holds value in terms of data analysis, reporting, or data management.

Common types of BI assets include datasets, reports, dashboards, databases, and other data-related objects created and maintained by data users within an organization. These assets form the backbone of your BI environment, as they are the entities that store, process, and present the data used for decision-making. Each asset comes with associated metadata, such as creation date, ownership, usage statistics, and compliance with established rules.

Monitors

A Monitor is a tool used to continuously track and evaluate the health and performance of Business Intelligence (BI) environment. Essentially, a monitor is a pre-written SQL query designed to extract and flag BI assets that breach predefined thresholds or criteria. It acts as a bulk filter, scanning your BI environment for any assets that deviate from set standards or expectations, such as outdated datasets, underused reports, or security vulnerabilities.

Monitors are highly customizable, allowing users to edit the SQL query, assign statuses, and determine the team responsible for resolving any triggered alerts. This makes monitors a powerful, scalable way to manage large sets of assets and ensure that any issues are detected and handled efficiently.

Alerts

An Alert is a notification generated when an asset breaches a threshold or criteria set within a Monitor. It's designed to notify users of problems within their BI environment and prompt them to take corrective actions.

Each alert provides key details about the issue, including the specific asset involved (e.g., datasets, reports, dashboards), the type of breach (e.g., unused report, failed refresh), and associated metadata (e.g., asset owner, creation date). Alerts serve as actionable items that help users identify and resolve issues quickly and efficiently.

Insights

Insights page is the visualization hub of BI (Business Intelligence) alerts and metadata within our platform. It provides users with a comprehensive view of their BI environment through summary of historical and real-time data. Insight delivers critical information in an easily digestible format, helping users monitor the health of their BI systems.

Connectors

A Connector in our platform is the critical gateway that allows the Datalogz team to access and interact with a client’s Business Intelligence (BI) environment. It serves as the key that connects our platform to various BI tools used by the client, such as PowerBI, Tableau, and Qlik. Connectors are typically made up of API keys, admin secrets, or similar authentication credentials provided by the BI tool, which grant the necessary permissions for our platform to monitor and gather data from these systems.

Datalogz uses metadata about the existence of BI reports, users, activities, and other BI assets. Datalogz does not require any data access to generate these alerts, so we do not require this level of permission to be granted to service principal credentials or personal access tokens. This means Datalogz does not have access to query any data that is used in BI reports. Datalogz only requires access to metadata about the nature of those BI reports, such as the title, description, configuration, asset lineage, usage patterns, refresh durations, successful uptime, and governance features. From this information, the Datalogz recommendations are generated without data access, which can also be described as “read-only access to metadata only.”

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Teams

A Team in our platform represents a group of individuals within an organization who collaborate toward shared business goals. Teams are typically organized around functional roles or departments, such as marketing, finance, or operations, and members of each team often require access to the same sets of BI (Business Intelligence) content, such as datasets, reports, and dashboards.

In essence, a team functions as a collection of users with similar data needs, providing a way to efficiently manage access to BI resources and organize collaborative efforts around the BI environment.

Creating Monitors

Default Monitors

These are out-of-the-box monitors created and owned by Datalogz team. Default Monitors are pre-configured to help users quickly begin monitoring common and critical aspects of their BI environment. These monitors are set up with default SQL queries and thresholds based on industry best practices, allowing users to start receiving alerts and insights without any initial setup.

My Monitors

These are user-created monitors. Currently, users can only create new monitors by duplicating an existing Default Monitor and modifying it according to their needs. My Monitors provide users the flexibility to adjust the monitoring criteria, such as SQL queries and thresholds, to fit their specific requirements.