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4.11 Release Notes

Welcome to the Scuba Analytics Q1 2021 release (4.11) ! Aside from being our first release with the new company name, we are bringing you major functionality and usability upgrades that will empower you to collaborate more quickly and intelligently across your organization. Going forward our roadmap will focus on four major themes: 

  1. Signals - Delivering actionable insights more quickly and with ease

  2. Data Collaboration - Empowering you to collaborate and activate data across your organization

  3. Usability - Our never ending quest to make your experience more delightful and productive 

  4. Enterprise Enablement - Our continuous focus on providing speed, scale and security

This overview provides a high level account of all the changes included in this release with a more detailed description below where needed. 

Overview

  1. Scuba Signals — “Helping you discover deeper insights more quickly and with less effort”

    • Signals *BETA* — Rather than manually checking your dashboards to monitor and see if critical metrics have changed, you now have the ability to define rules-based query-monitoring automations that will notify you immediately via email once a rule-based boundary is activated. 

    • Surface now in the expression builder — Users now have the ability to use a NOW() function in the query panel for better time-based query use cases. 

    • Custom-configure the adaptive sampling limit — You now have the ability to configure your sampling limits per cluster.

  2. Data Collaboration — “Empowering you to collaborate and activate data across your organization”

    • Embedded Insights via API — While using the API, customers can now use an “explore_url” flag that links directly to a Scuba dashboard instead of analyzing the BQL results manually in the raw JSON format.  This allows you to more easily embed Scuba intelligence dashboards into your existing technology stack and applications. 

    • BQL Upgrades - You can now name measures and apply time offsets

  3. Usability“Our never ending quest to make your experience more delightful and productive”

    • Panel vs. Board Deletion Improvements — We have made board deletion more intuitive to safeguard you from accidentally deleting a board. 

    • Right click on the left navigation bar — a small but meaningful usability enhancement now lets you right-click on the navigation bar on the left side of the product to open either the Insights, Explore, Apps, or Data sections in a new tab in your browser without being locked into one single application tab or launching the Scuba app a second time from scratch. 

    • UI Re-brand — we’ve overhauled the UI to reflect our new name, logo, and color scheme.

    • Ability to overwrite UI language, colors, and styles — You can now customize the language, colors and style of the Scuba application to meet your organizations needs

  4. Enterprise Enablement — “Our continuous focus on providing speed, scale and security”

    • GDPR Enhancements — Rather than purging an ID across all tables, you can now run table specific purges. 


Detailed Description: Automated Insights

Scuba Signals *BETA*

The purpose of any analytics tool is to facilitate the discovery of “insights” or things that users did not know previously. Currently we have the ability to schedule and send dashboard reports. With Scuba Signals we take this a step further and enable users to schedule queries and receive emails if the results of the query fall within (or outside) some expected value. This allows for continuous monitoring and alerting across all data, events and queries to measure and predict outcomes. 

As an example, a rapidly growing SaaS company that sees a consistent increase in their overall usage week over week, may find it insightful to discover that there has been a decrease in overall usage. Rather than manually running a query every week to see if such a decrease has taken place, Scuba Signals can be used to schedule the query and automatically alert users when such a drop in usage occurs. 

Additionally this can be used for machine learning model drift monitoring to ensure that ML segments and lead-scoring models are maintained to optimize AI-driven marketing campaigns. This allows ML models to continuously improve on a daily basis without risking a breakdown. 

Below is a screenshot that shows a Scuba Signals configuration that compares event traffic this week to the prior week. The query scheduling interval is set to run once a week. If the condition is met then an email alert will be sent to the chosen list of emails. 

Surface NOW In Expression Builder

Users often have questions about the time since something last happened. Scuba has always had the notion of time embedded in the application. However, this has not always been available to users in the query panel. With the NOW() operator available to users, we can easily answer this category of questions.

Custom Configuration of the Adaptive Sampling Limit

Customers have told us that our default Adaptive Sampling limit was too low for their use cases, and we agreed! We now support the ability to configure the adaptive sampling limit on a per-cluster basis, so let us know if you’re interested in upping yours. To read more about Adaptive Sampling and how we sample in Scuba, click here:


Detailed Description: Data Collaboration

Embedded Insights via API

Many of our customers include embedded links to the Scuba UI in other applications. Some customers use Scuba to visualize application performance data and include links to the dashboard in their application regression testing development tools. Other Scuba customers include links to dashboards that serve debugging and A/B testing use cases for product managers to evaluate the performance of the latest release. Other Scuba customers that have account-based marketing activities have created dashboards with dashboards about specific B2B accounts. Before, customers could solve for each of these use-cases manually by navigating to these dashboards using the UI or dashboard links. Now, using the API to UI feature, developers can embed these links directly into their own custom applications. 

If the return type is set to “explore_url” in the JSON request, the same API call will give you a link to the dashboard that visualizes the data so that you can visualize it and embed the dashboard directly (instead of wrangling the raw data). 

In Interana V2, we had query parameters baked into the URL which enabled these customers to use the URL as an unsupported API. With Scuba V4, we moved away from this in favor of using responseIds that are cached and unique to a given query. The problem was that multiple customers had built middleware around the V2 URL.

With the API to UI feature, we can now take a BAQL query and immediately translate that into a responseId, which can then bring a user directly into the Scuba UI. 

BQL

Time offsets

We can, now, specify one or more time offsets and get data in json format or an explore query where we can see comparison with previous hour, day, week, month, quarter, year…

Example BQL query: select count (*) from fashion time_offset by -1 week and by -1 month


Measure naming

We can name measures, both when returning data or an explore url


Detailed Description: Usability

Panel vs. Dashboard Deletion Improvements

Users often want to delete individual panels on a dashboard but sometimes, they end up deleting the entire dashboard. In order to protect against this, we’ve added some additional color treatments to highlight when a dashboard is being deleted.

image.png


UI Rebranding

Earlier this year we rebranded, which included changing the name of the company from Interana to Scuba. Along with the name change, we added a new logo and introduced an entirely new color palette. The UI takes this as inspiration and we’ve simplified the UI coloring and added some snappy new animations.

Overwrite UI Language, Colors, and Styles

In order to facilitate the internationalization and white labeling of our application, we introduced the ability to configure and customize the text in the Scuba application. Currently, we will support a single language per cluster with a language file that contains all text of the application. Once we have a mapping between old and new text blocks, we can load that on a cluster and make changes without needing to push a new build.


Detailed Description: Enterprise Enablement

GDPR Enhancements

When we first architected our GDPR functionality, we assumed that companies would always log their shard keys as the same data type across every table in their cluster. However, some companies have more granular, team-specific levels of data governance and you can run into situations where you have the “user” column in one table logged as a string, and the “user” column in a second table logged as an int. While we’ve always supported the ability of customers to run GDPR/CCPA data deletes, in 4.11 we’ve introduced the ability to run table-specific GDPR purges. If your team needs to run table-specific data deletes, reach out! We’ll get your Scuba data GDPR-compliant in no time.


Roadmap

As the leading continuous intelligence platform, we are on a quest to help you expand knowledge across channels by empowering stakeholders such as Line of Business Owners and Data Scientists to collaborate. This is what is at the heart of collaborative intelligence, and as such our roadmap will further enable your stakeholders with self-service and automated out-of-the-box insights. 

Here are just a few highlights: 

  • OOTB Dashboards - An out-of-the-box retention dashboard including KPIs and various data visualizations that requires minimal configuration.

  • Slack Integration - A slack Integration for Scuba Signals so that you can get notified immediately in a slack whenever a custom alert gets triggered.

  • Data annotations - Data annotation capabilities on timeline visualizations to visually highlight release dates or other important events for easier communication and collaboration. 

  • Board Refresh Enhancements - The board auto-refresh settings can be customized so that you are not left with a loading board during critical moments and meetings. 


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