Using drillthrough to refine your results

Explore's drillthrough functionality gives you a more in-depth view of your data by providing you with a table of attributes and metrics that relate to the data selected in the query. Drillthrough first filters data based on the values you select and then slices it by each attribute you chose.

In this article, you'll learn about some best practices for using drillthrough. To find out more about other available query interactions, see Interacting with queries.

Note: If drillthrough does not achieve your reporting goals, consider using the Decompose interaction instead.

This article contains the following sections:

• Select only the attributes you need
• Apply filters at the query level
• Query all needed data tables

Select only the attributes you need

All attributes in the dataset are selected in drillthrough by default which might result in a table that is too big to be usable. To produce a more manageable table, deselect all drillthrough attributes in Chart configuration > Drillthrough and select only the elements you want to include.

Note: Not all attributes and metrics present in the dataset can be added to the drillthrough table. Those that can be added will be listed in the Drillthrough panel.

Apply filters at the query level

Currently, drillthrough doesn't take into consideration any metric level filters. To ensure that the drillthrough results are filtered correctly all necessary filters must be placed in the query itself.

For example, if drillthrough is applied on the Solved tickets metric (which is filtered to return only solved tickets at the metric level) the results it will generate will actually be based on all tickets in any possible status. To avoid this, the Ticket status filter needs to be added to the query:

Query all needed data tables

Each dataset consists of multiple tables that are queried depending on the field selected in the query builder. Drillthrough can display only attributes or metrics that are part of the already queried data tables. So, if only the Tickets table was queried, attributes like Assignee Name and Requester Organization name are not shown in the drillthrough table, because they are located in the Assignee and Requester organization tables respectively.

To query all necessary tables add one of the attributes located in the data table to the query filters and select some or all values. For example, to query the Assignee table use the Assignee role attribute and to query the Requester organization table use the Requester organization status. 

If an attribute is added as a filter to ensure the required tables are queried, but nothing for that filter is selected, select to exclude NULL values.