Understanding disconnected date dimensions in Insights (Professional and Enterprise)

Zendesk Explore is our new analytics software. In the future, we’ll be discontinuing Insights and you’ll need to start using Explore. To make the move now, see Moving to Explore from Insights.

By Chiara Rizzi, GoodData

With Insights, you can create a lot of great reports and add them to dashboards to give meaning to your Help Desk data. In this article, we will explain how to build a dashboard with a lot of different reports, all within a selected date range.

Let’s imagine you have these reports in your dashboard: Tickets Created, Tickets Solved, Satisfaction Score, and Backlog Tickets. And you want to see data for each of these reports from the 1st of January to the 15th of March. Do you see the conflict here?

The difficult way at this point would be to add different date filters to every report, and then modify every single report every time you’d want to see different date ranges. That’s a ton of work!

Insights has an amazing and simpler new way to do this: the Date (Timeline) Filter. When you change this filter, all the reports automatically show data for the time range selected. Sounds easy, right?

But how does it work, exactly?

Let's look at an example in the pre-built dashboard

Let’s take a look at one of the pre-built reports in your “Insights - View Only dashboard” called Tickets created by channel, which is in the Tickets tab.

This dashboard where we’ve also added our report, is a great example because it already contains a Date (Timeline) Filter we can play around with.

You don’t need to modify this report in any way, but it’s a good example to follow when you want to create another dashboard and use the Date (Timeline) Filter.

Let's look at how the example report is defined

Now let’s look at how the Tickets created by channel report is defined, especially the filter:

As you can see, there is quite a peculiar filter here: Date (Ticket Created) where _Filter Ticket Created Date is greater than 0.Without this filter, the report won’t show the date range 1st of January - 15th of March as we would like to. But why?

Every date in GoodData has a numerical value associated to it. To make a report work with the disconnected Timeline date filter, you have to construct a metric that gets the date numeric value from the dashboard filter, and also affects the report structure, otherwise it won’t work.

These types of metrics are already pre-built in Insights, so you don’t have to create them. They all start with the prefix _Filter. Each metric relates to a specific date dimension and so you can select whichever metric makes sense for your report.

For example, if you wanted your report to be filtered on Date (Ticket Solved), you'd choose the _Filter Ticket Solved Date metric.

If you apply this kind of filter to all of the reports you want to add to your dashboard, the date (timeline) will work perfectly, as it will show you the results you want!

Happy reporting!