AppInsights user guide

❗ Important: The documentation in this topic refers to a feature or product that is currently in Early Availability status. Features in Early Availability status are only available in production to a limited number of customers based on fit with specific use cases. For more information about Early Availability status, see Product lifecycle phases. If you would like to use the product capabilities described here during the Early Availability phase, contact your AppDirect technical representative.

AppInsights is a data visualization and data monitoring tool that empowers users to keep track of the critical KPIs that impact their businesses, campaigns, and projects. We offer a powerful set of tools that allow users to easily gather, consume, and share their data in a visually compelling dashboard environment, with data streams updating in real-time.

For both small businesses and enterprise companies, the average number of relevant data sources that provide insight into company success is growing rapidly. With AppInsights, users can interpret the high volume of data generated by their businesses and focus on key metrics. AppInsights dynamically centralizes all of your desired KPIs keeps them current for review by your stakeholders whenever required.

Guide contents

This document provides guidance to help you decide which data sources and KPIs are most important to you, describes different data connectivity options, and explains how to enrich interactions with your data. Specifically, we will cover how you can:

• Use alerts and goal thresholds to improve decision-making based on the activity of your KPIs
• Share dashboards to improve the visibility of key data within an organization or team
• Export data from AppInsights with spreadsheets or our custom API

Glossary

Access key—unique identifier for each customer account, required for use of our Push Data functionality

Alerts—email messages triggered by metric activity, can be sent to individual users or larger groups

App tile or service tile—the UI elements within the AppInsights services pane that allow you to select your data sources and widget types

Authentication—another term for a connection to an out-of-the-box integration (Google Analytics, Zendesk, Harvest, and so on) managed in the “Authentications” pane

Custom content—refers to a selection of widgets that can surface media or other content rather than data alone (Label widget, Image widget, HTML widget, Time widget)

Custom data—term for any data within AppInsights that is surfaced without the use of our out-of-the-box integrations

Custom data tools—used to surface custom data; refers to our database connectors, Google Sheet integration, CSV upload tool, or Push & Fetch data tools

Dashboard—the focal point of the AppInsights UI; a 24x12 grid that contains your various widgets

Dashboard collection—a set of dashboards that is grouped and ordered according to user preference for easy sharing using our share-link feature

Data retriever—interchangeable with “metric”; refers to the available data points or data sets through a given service integration (number will vary by service)

Data settings tab—found within the “Edit Widget Settings” menu; allows users to modify their data connection and the structure of the data that is being pushed to the visualization

Display mode—optimizes dashboard for viewing by removing menus and expanding size of widgets, triggered by clicking the eye icon at top left of your dashboard

Edit Widget Settings menu—interchangeable with “Widget editor”, toggled by clicking the gear icon at top right of any widget; provides access to the Data Settings and Widget Settings tab

Footer—bottom portion of the dashboard that includes the date, time, and logo field; toggled on / off in the Basic Styling menu

Grid resolution—the density of the dashboard grid, 24x12 squares

Header—top portion of the dashboard that includes the dashboard name; toggled on / off in the Basic Styling menu

Metrics—refers to the available data points or data sets through a given service integration (number will vary by service)

Service integration, out-of-the-box integration, or integration—various names for the AppInsights connections to popular web-based applications (i.e. Google Analytics, Zendesk, Harvest, etc.)

Services panel—toggled by clicking the blue “+” button on the left side of the dashboard; offers users a selection of data sources that can be connected to their dashboards

Share-link—a custom URL that provides view only access to a live dashboard or collection of dashboards

Report—email a report with an image of the dashboard in png or pdf format. This can be triggered manually by the user or scheduled for automated sending on specific days / times

Stream-points—term used to describe the data points associated with a widget

Stream name—unique identifier for the data source associated with a specific widget, required for use of our custom Push or Fetch Data tools

Template—a pre-packaged set of metrics that fill an entire dashboard, making it easy for new users to get started with common web services

User—anybody who has been given owner, view and edit, or view only access to a AppInsights dashboard account

Visualizations—refers to the data representation options available to AppInsights users

Widget—interchangeable with “visualizations”, but may also refer to custom content widgets that surface images or other media (RSS, gallery, HTML widgets) rather than data

Widget editor—interchangeable with the “Edit Widget Settings” menu, toggled by clicking the gear icon at top right of any widget; provides access to the Data Settings and Widget Settings tab

Widget settings tab—found within the “Edit Widget Settings” menu; allows users to modify the visual output of their data