Question
I want to validate the report or dashboard I'm looking at. How do I cross-check and verify that the report displays the data I intend it to show?
Answer
There are several ways to verify and validate the reports you see in Explore. Drill into the data to get more specific information, cross-check with another product, or use an example to help you pinpoint discrepancies. Below are strategies that you can follow to verify data in a report or dashboard.
Drill in or decompose
Use drill in and decompose to see what data is reflected in your report. For more information, see the article: Interacting with reports.
If you need to validate data in a prebuilt dashboard, clone the dashboard first and then use the above interactions to learn more about the report.
Cross-check the source
Use the advanced search functionality in Support to pull up a list of tickets that should be reflected in your report. Cross-check to confirm if your report shows correct data. Look out for data discrepancy between your search terms and the filters and metrics in your report.
Check a specific example
Open a specific example of a call, chat, article, or ticket that you expect to be in the report but is missing. Then, cross-check that example with your report to see what characteristics don't match with the report that causes it to be excluded.
See these strategies in action
Be mindful of filters. The report below shows recorded outbound calls from the year 2020 in the Mountain Dog brand.
The goal of this exercise is to see ticket IDs associated with each call recording. To do that, decompose the report with the Ticket ID attribute to see more details.
To double-check this data in Support, use advanced search. For example:
via:phone_call_outband brand:"Mountain dog" created>"2020-01-01" created<"2020-12-31"
Ticket ID #303 has a call recording but the report doesn't display that ticket. Open the ticket to confirm that it meets the filter and metric conditions. In this example, although the call was in 2020, the brand is Z3N DOG instead of Mountain Dog, and the call is inbound rather than outbound.
For more information, see the article: Troubleshooting guide: Explore reporting data discrepancy.