| 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
@..., thank you for raising this concern. We'll be removing Decompose only once Drill-in will be enabled and will function correctly in the prebuilt dashboards that are available to you as part of the Explore Lite plan.
@...,
Good day,
Like @Matt McLeary mentioned above. This change is shocking. I honestly don't understand why was this change applied without notifying the clients who have paid subscriptions.
It's funny that you would announce with a written notification inside zendesk that you are moving way from using Targets and transition to webhooks, yet you did not act in a similar manner with this change. From a user/client standpoint, the user experience had taken a turn for the worse in the last period when we talk about Zendesk.
We used drillthrough and decompose in all of our dashboards and now we find ourselves in the position to review each of them because this drill in feature just looks awful and counterintuitive. We simply don't understand how to use it and why you would by default automatically add the drill in feature where drillthrough was initially. It confuses everyone who wants to see the details behind the numbers.
I don't expect any action/reply, just want to share the feedback about our experience with this "new improved drill-in" feature.
Emil
Hi
How can we do when we have a lot of requests in a dashbord and when I click on in a part of one or more charts, the others requests (charts, board ...) update whith it.
Thank you to everyone who has provided feedback for our latest drill-in feature and rollout.
We are listening, and are reviewing and reforming our internal processes to ensure future Explore updates are rolled out with ample time to learn about and adapt to changing features. We acknowledge the challenges this change has caused our users and are working hard to address the incoming feedback.
Why we built this
As of today, there are two available interactions: Drill-in and Decompose. We would like to share context around some of the challenges we are solving for with the new experience:
As a result, we decided to replace all interactions with the single Drill-in interaction that will allow users to achieve the same goals as Drillthrough, Decompose and Focus in a slightly different way. However, it is clear to us that the first phase of this feature has fallen short of expectations from our users and we are working to address this with future planned enhancements.
What’s next for drill-in
We are planning further Drill-in enhancements to meet the needs of our users, with the idea that Drill-in will eventually replace Decompose in the future. Please help us set the right priorities by letting us know which functionality you are missing in the new drill-in feature. You can do so by posting and voting for existing posts in the Explore community section.
"By default, drilling in to a metric includes results with a value of zero. If you need to filter out zero values, you can create a metric filter."
This 100% doesn't work. The Drill in ignores it completely.
Hello,
I would agree with the comments above, these changes are not convenient, especially the Filter Other part.
How are we suppose to easily filter the board now ? My board is supposed to be shared with stakeholders, and allowing them to drillthrough and then filter the board was perfect.
Now if I want to let my stakeholders filter the board, I have to propose a lot of filter options at the end of the board....it does not make sense.
If I have 10 categories, and 10 sub categories for each of these categories, then I will have to implement 20 filters at the top of the screen to let my stakeholders find their information?
Maybe I missed something, but by reading the documentation, it's not super clear how to adapt the flows and I'm kinda disappointed at the moment :/
Please allow us to decompose and filter the dashboard based on the decompose actions made....
Hi @...,
thanks for sharing your feedback about Drill In.
I get your use case about willing to share a dashboard that could then be filtered by other stakeholders.
The decompose experience hasn't changed, your stakeholders should be able to use it as usual. Can you please verify the "Enable decompose" option is still active on your dashboard?
As for drilling into data, once the "Enable Drill In" interaction option is active in your tab, dashboard viewers will be able to filter and deep dive into data by using the Drill In on each query.
May I ask you to verify this option is enabled on your dashboard?
You can then define which attributes viewers can use by configuring them in the "Drill in" options of the "Chart Configuration" section of the query builder.
Thanks,
Walter
Earlier we could Drill through all the fields and now you have put a limitation of 20 fields only. This is not an improvement. This is called Limitation.
All my clients have come back and we are taking the heat due to this change. Why will you bring the limitations and call it improvement???
Hello @..., thanks for your reply.
I read on your previous comments that the Decompose will be removed in a near future? For the moment we can indeed decompose, but we can no longer filter the board based on the decompose.
The drill in offers a list of tickets ID with attributes, it's good for quality review and calibration sessions with your agents as a Support manager...But it's not super interesting for Product teams who would like to have data about the kind of requests and volumes.
Here is a video example to illustrate : https://gyazo.com/2501b3d85bf84b928e7d1ff9b72d5bab
As you can see, we have many sub ticket fields to categorize our tickets as much as possible. Before, after the decompose illustrated in the video, we were able to click on Filter other to refresh the entiere board with the different set of sub categories selected....With the filter other, I was able to know.
Use case with video : (As seen on the video, if I want to dive in into a specific section of my product, I can see that we had 21 tickets about Mass uploads...With the filter other feature, I was able to have the pie chart on the right updated, to know if the requests are related to an issue, a question, a feature request and so on...)
Now how can I do the same thing easily without adding several dozens filters to the top of my dashboard ?
Thanks,
Giovanni
Any plans to have drill ins stop displaying values of zero by default? Metric filters are completely ignored by the drill in feature.
I have a common situation where after filtering, I should have 5-6 tickets I need to drill into but Drill In is returning about 400 when I click on the value displayed in the report. I can't sort/order the columns in the drill in UI either, so I need to export a CSV and filter out the zero values. It's not very much fun to use and is creating extra work
Things Drill in still doesn't work for:
* Anything with CSAT
* Anything with color-coding
* Anything with Metric Filtering
These are just things I've personally hit and found to be nonfunctional. (all sent in and all replied with "watch the release notes for when this is fixed")
It would be really nice if there was a section of this article that addressed what you can and cannot use Drill in on.
Dan Ross, thank you for the feedback. Yes, we are planning to stop displacing rows that have zero values. It is on our to-do list for this quarter.
CJ Johnson, thank you for sharing the problems you faced.
Hi Eugene,
Thanks, this is kind of a frustrating message to get, because Support closed out my tickets and I have been reading all announcements waiting for these fixes, as I was instructed, and they were never announced. I follow every single possible flavor of announcement, which is a lot of extra noise by the way, trying to make sure I can catch these updates, so it's not great to find out that they aren't even happening.
Ticket 6544425 - Been waiting and "watching for updates" about CSAT not being compatible with drill in since June.
Ticket 641303 - Been waiting since May to hear about heatmaps not breaking on drill in.
Metric filters - 6812327, I was told this is not a bug but that Zendesk already has plans to fix this and to "watch for updates". Do I need to write up another use case when I was told this was already planned and I should watch for the update?
Drill in feature is not working, when i select KPI visualization. When in edit mode if i do drill in the data is showing fine. But after saving the query if i do drill in it is not showing the selected attribute data in tabular format.
Hi! I'm using this standard calculated metric to display all tickets with multiple tags, with the COUNT aggregator:
However, when I Drill in, it's showing me Ticket IDs that do not have both tags:
@Colin-Pierre Larnerd, Unfortunately, you can't. I asked the same thing and was told this is a feature, not a bug. Metric filtering also doesn't apply to drill-in, so you cannot even filter them out that way.
This is a result of Zendesk using "OUTER LEFT JOIN" in Explore's queries where most people would expect "INNER LEFT JOIN", resulting in the new set adding in a row for every value it has that *doesn't* match anything on the first set, in addition to what does match.
This is also a huge contributor to why Explore queries bloat up in size so fast and take so long to generate.
Additionally, I've asked about Drill in showing the values for all top level metrics, instead of the singular one you'd be drilling in on by clicking on a cell, and was told this is also a feature not a bug, despite it making it ridiculously hard to see anything in the drill in and causing a lot of bloat and unnecessary data in the drill in export.
CJ Johnson After much trial and error, I figured out how Drill In to see ticket IDs that have multiple tags.
I created a query using these parameters:
Metrics: Standard Calculated METRIC— with COUNT aggregator:
Rows: Standard Calculated ATTRIBUTE— exclude NULL:
Enable Drill In; Use Ticket ID as attribute.
I hope this helps!
Hello,
I have a fully authorized agent in zendesk that is unable to see the drill in option. I have the tab export options set to Allow All, enabled Interaction Options to "Enable drill in". The agent only gets the option to copy and not the option for a drill in.
He's using chrome on mac os. Are there any known issues with mac os users having trouble with accessing the drill in feature
It may depend on which dashboard query your agent is trying to drill in to, since drill in is enabled at the query level. For example, in the Tickets tab of the default Zendesk Support dashboard, drill in is not enabled for the first row of numbers along the top (Created tickets, Unsolved, tickets. etc.). But if you click on one of the vertical bars in the "Tickets created by hour" query below that, you should see the drill in option, since it's enabled for that query.
Can you verify which queries your agent is trying to drill in to, and verify whether you're also unable to drill in to them? Thanks!
Drill In is not working in Dashboard. Not sure why I have enabled the drill in at the tab options level for all tabs (I have 4 tabs) The drill in works only in the query. Otherwise I am given a "no data available. Check you filters and calculations. I have tried support and they are unable to assist. When will this be fixed at the dashboard level
It looks like you have a ticket/conversation open with our Customer Care team regarding this issue. Since this is a potential bug you're experiencing, we will continue working with you in that ticket to get this issue resolved.
If you can reply back to your previous conversation related to this issue with any other information you can provide that may help point us in the right direction :)
Cheers!
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