| Announced on | Rollout on |
| July 14, 2021 | July 26, 2021 |
On July 26, 2021, we’ll be releasing a new query interaction called drill in. This feature provides a flexible yet consistent tool for digging into your data, enabling you to easily discover trends, investigate spikes, and more.
The new drill in feature replaces the drillthrough and decompose query interactions. Not only does drill in consolidate the functionality of drillthrough and decompose, it also eliminates certain limitations of those legacy query interactions.
How does drill in work?
Drill in can be enabled in the Chart configuration ( 
) menu of Query builder. When creating a report, the report editor can choose which attributes should be available in the drill in feature by default, as well as choose whether to allow report viewers to add additional drill in attributes later on.
For more information on configuring and using the drill in feature, see Using drill in to refine your queries.
What makes drill in better?
The drill in query interaction gives you greater reporting power and flexibility when compared to the legacy drillthrough and decompose interactions. Specifically, drill in:
- Includes clickable links for tickets, users, organizations, and more for easy reference.
- Can be easily applied on all visualizations, including KPIs and line charts.
- Always opens in a separate window, not inside of the widget (no more widget size restriction).
- Can be applied on any type of metric, including calculated metrics.
- Can include any type of attribute, including calculated attributes.
- Displays data that can be easily copied or exported in CSV or Excel format.
- Enables viewers to add and remove attributes without having to update their query.
How does this impact me?
The following interactions will be removed and replaced by the new drill in feature:
- Drillthrough
- Decompose
- Focus
- Filter others
- Filter others only
What action do I need to take?
If you’ve configured drillthrough or decompose in any of your queries, the attributes you used in those legacy interactions will automatically be mapped to the new drill in interaction. In the majority of cases, we anticipate that you won’t need to take any action and can simply use drill in instead of drillthrough or decompose going forward.
However, it’s possible that the automatic mapping won’t cover all of your use cases. We recommend reviewing your most important reports that used drillthrough or decompose functionality to ensure that the most appropriate drill in configuration is set.
To reproduce focus, filter others, and filter others only functionality, see the next section.
Additionally, you might need to proactively enable the drill in feature on certain dashboards. This applies only to dashboards where you’ve previously disabled other query interactions (including drillthrough, decompose, filter others, filter others only, or focus).
- Open your dashboard for editing.
- Click Tab options > Interaction options (
). - Select Enable drill in.
How can I achieve the same functionality as the legacy interactions?
-
Drillthrough: Use the Selected attributes feature in the Drill in panel to select the attributes that you want to appear by default in the drill in table.
-
Decompose and focus. Use the Enable adding attributes feature in the Drill in panel to select the additional attributes that viewers should be able to choose from.
- Filter others and filter others only. These interactions were available only within dashboards and can be replaced with additional filters added to the dashboard itself. Using dashboard filters is the best way to let viewers dynamically narrow results.
Questions or feedback?
If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment below. If you have suggested improvements for the drill in feature, or if you’ve identified missing functionality in the current implementation, create a new post or comment in our user community.
51 Comments
We’ve updated the article to note that clickable links will be coming at a later date. We’ll keep you posted!
@... That's VERY disappointing. That was the 1 thing 100% of my clients ask for. We were all very excited but now this is such a letdown.
How long until clickable links are available? It should have been one of the first things built to bring explore into parity with the old Insights platform. It's something that a lot of Insights users relied on and that's still currently lacking in explore.
The article has been updated to include more details about the upcoming drill-in feature, including actions you might need to take in edge cases where the automatic mapping between drill-in and drillthrough/decompose doesn't fit your needs.
I am quite disappointed to read this after notifying the changes to our instance (which, moreover, does not seem to work correctly).
The option to decompose was very valuable to our team (and I'm sure we're not the only one with this opinion), as viewing in detail the data is very useful and our entire instance (forms and ticket fields) was posed to view it this way. Now, the work is complicated for us as we are forced to export a large amount of data to look at a detailed field. I really think this change does not give value to the product, I hope you will consider bringing back the decompose option.
Hi @...,
thanks for your patience,
I am glad to share clickable links are now available with drill-in.
@... can you share the use case you had with decompose and you can't build with the new drill-in?
Hi @..., normally we used the option to decompose in the pie charts, it was the most visual option to see the % of tickets of the same category or with the same attribute, and then decompose this result again in another level. Now we have the option but not in a visual way (at least I have not found it). I mean, we do have the data results but not into the graphic. Also, we need to choose before the attributes in which we're going to drill in, instead of have the whole list as we used to have.
Hi Walter,
Thanks for the update. We've followed the instructions provided here, however, this new feature is not working in Zendesk. When we click on Drill-in in our reports, nothing happens (blank screen) and we're not getting the data needed. Is there an action needed to reconfigure the Drill-in feature from scratch since it's been updated?
Your help is greatly appreciated. Thanks
Drill-In also is not working for us, using a chart that previously had Drillthrough configured. Seeing this error in the console:
The tooltip also renders poorly on the rightmost columns (better to open tooltip on the *left* side in these cases):
Perhaps this feature needs to be turned off until it gets a little more QA?
"Filter Others & Filter Others Only" is no longer an option while on our dashboards. The related section on this page says it should be available while on a dashboard. How do we re-enable that feature?
Decompose was very useful in that it allowed 1 table to be manipulated by several people in different ways, that suited them to find particular information across the entire Zendesk data set.
Drill in limits you to only 10 attributes, and has to be configured from within the query itself - a huge inconvenience if you want to use the base report for more than 1 purpose and have continually edit it over and over.
This also means people using the reports have to have greater access to the main query (and know how to not break the base query .vs. edit them for one time uses) and makes it entirely more complicated.
Very disappointed that the decompose option was removed entirely. Sure, add in drill-in, obviously someone finds it useful, but maybe give the customer (us) the option of disabling it ourselves, or continuing to use it.
Agree completely with Sandra Lefort's comment.
One thing to add, Drill-in is only available, it seems, from queries and not from dashboards. I go into my dashboards and click into a table or chart, and the only option is to Copy. We used to be able to drillthrough from there. For instance, to see *which* tickets the results related to. But we Drill-in isn't available it seems in dashboards.
When will this be fixed @...?
Clicking on the 370 above only shows the 'Copy' action
One question I have: Do we have to enable Drill-in for *each* query in a dashboard to make it visible? If there was a way that anyone could use Drill-in by default that would be much easier for us than having to configure it for each and every query.
Very disappointing extremely complicated function! The previous decompose option was superior! Is there an option go have it alongside/instead of drill in ?
@... Not sure why this happened but I had the same issue and resolved by updating the following setting.
https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360059333453-Why-doesn-t-the-drillthrough-option-appear-in-the-dashboard-
Probably, your drill-through setting on the dashboard is disabled.
Hi @..., @..., and @...,
thanks for sharing your experience on the new drill-in feature.
Based on your recent feedback, we are looking into temporarily reactivating the decompose feature in the next 3 weeks.
I will keep you posted here once it's restored.
Hi, @...,
thanks for sharing your feedback about drill-in.
I believe the solution suggested by @... (thanks for the tip!) should solve your use case as dashboards need to have the "Drill In" interaction option enabled to display the menu.
As for your second question, drill-in is intentionally disabled by default to prevent viewers from accessing unwanted data when new queries are created.
Existing queries that had drillthrough enabled have drill-in enabled by default.
Hi @...,
"Filter Others & Filter Others Only" are no longer available in dashboards.
Sorry for the misunderstanding, I have just updated the article to reflect this information.
Hi Walter, how are you?
Aligned with the previous comments, it is not clear to me what the advantage of this new update is, since the function is the same as that of getting details. On the other hand, as Matthew commented, this should supplant obtaining details in each query and each report that we have in our panels.
Because now I have to enter query by query to correct add this function.
What also happens is that I enter and within the configuration it has the option enabled, but when selecting the value, it only gives me the option to copy.
In some that I do see the option to analyze, it takes too long to load the information and the way it is presented is not clear and does not allow quick conclusions to be drawn, without the need to export to an excel file.
We hope you can improve this feature soon.
Thank you very much, greetings!
Thanks for confirming Walter. However, I too echo the above comments. There are a couple advantages to the new feature but it removes far more than it gives.
I disagree that using dashboard data/time filters is always "best practice," which now seems to be the parroted response to questions. Using click and drag to quickly filter 1 or all queries on a dashboard was effortless. You could easily filter by date, series, etc. for quick analysis and filtering. And, we still had access to drill and although it wasnt perfect, it was easy to use in conjuction with other functionality.
You have now forced everyone to add more filters to dashboards. We now have to click more to get the same result. There is now only 1 option, that is extremely narrow and limiting. What I, and it sounds like others, dont understand is why ZD has removed the flexibility we once had. Why can you not add this new feature but still allow for flexibility? Why can we not decide how to use our own dashboards? Is it not reasonable to allow us access to both with the ownership to decide for ourselves?
Another disappointing update that further cripples an already inferior reporting tool. As others have pointed out, the new process is extremely cumbersome and takes away more than it provides. Glad to see ZD might be adding back Decompose in "the next 3 weeks," but most of us have reporting needs that can't wait that long. Very glad I migrated most of my vital reporting to a proper BI tool last year and will continue to suggest that others do the same whenever possible.
This is frankly - shocking. We have been using the features in there heavily, we trained staff on how to do it - AT OUR EXPENSE - and then here we go again, another typical Zendesk moment - change it without community engagement first.
The only way to turn this around is to do proper training on this, and fast, as I'm sure (like us) everyone has end-of-month reports due, and the change you've made here, will absolutely kill that process.
A very, very unhappy customer.
Hello @...
You saying that the decompose feature will be enabled within 3 weeks? I need this feature to be available now.
We are not able to decompose general report with detailed information for the further reporting needs. The Drill In feature is not covering at all the work done by Decompose feature.
Thanks
Hi guys,
Is there a reason Focus was removed as an option from the query editor?
It was really useful as a work-around for filtering queries with custom attributes (in the updates dataset) because Zendesk Explore takes forever to load the list of values for custom attributes , even when the only possible options are TRUE or FALSE. I appreciate the time taken is due to the emense size of the dataset but this is still very difficult to work with.
Using Focus I was able to easily filter the query by the attributes I needed without having to wait 1-2 mins for the list to either load, or worse, give up and tell me that the list has taken too long to calculate. Again, this happens even when there are only 2 possible outcomes e.g. TRUE or FALSE.
Would it be possible to reenable focus on the query editor please? The updates dataset allows us to get very powerful insights into the data but this can only really be done when combined with custom attributes. And if I cant filter these custom attributes because they take too long to load, it's essentually useless.
Dear customers,
I am glad to share that as of now:
Thanks for sharing your input about this feature.
Thanks, @... - I can't express how happy this has made us but also how important this feature is to us.
Hi @...
great to hear that! Thank you
Thanks Walter. For upcoming changes, I suggest you put more effort into QA.
Thank you for re-instating decompose I too was experiencing problems with drill through. All seems to be working again on my dashboard apart from my bar charts and funnel charts. I have checked that all the settings are the same and correct in 'tab options' and query configuration but decompose or even drill through is not available on just these two chart types. Am I missing something?
Hello,
Thank you, but I don't see Filter others and filter others only in the Interaction's option, ans others options aren't here.
It's very important usuel functions in our company and in the others.
When can we have it again ?
Where does this leave us, using Explore Lite and cannot benefit from Drill-In?
I am told by support that you rolled back Decompose temporarily but will eventually remove it.
If Drill-In replaces Decompose then we will lose a feature we depend on.
Decompose is a feature we reply on with the limitation of Explore Lite so removing this for us is going to be critical to our reporting.
Please advise.
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