We are excited to announce the launch of our new Live Insights capability. Live Insights are fast, automated insights run inside cloud data warehouses that greatly expedite the discovery of trend drivers, cohorts, and anomalies from terabytes of unaggregated data. Read on to learn how they can help you unlock the value of your modern data stack.
Written by: Chris Walker,
Head of Product Marketing at Tellius
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The Challenge
With so much data storage and compute resources available in the cloud, we think that all that power should be utilized to simplify and speed analysis, making it easier for technical and non-technical people to get deeper insights from massive datasets. Analysis such as comparing cohorts, detecting anomalies, or identifying trend drivers shouldn’t be limited to SQL-savvy data analysts who must manually slice and dice a handful of variables. As the modern data stack and cloud data warehouse-centric architectures gain popularity, organizations prefer to process data inside the data warehouse instead of extracting data in or out of analysis and visualization tools.
Suppose an organization has TBs of granular data related to customers, orders, and suppliers in Snowflake and the goal is to spot key drivers, compare cohorts, or catch anomalies. An analyst might take the following steps: first, formulate a hypothesis, then use Snowflake’s built in SQL query interface or your preferred terminal to generate a query, extract a subset/aggregation of the variables of interest, then use a preferred BI/Viz tool to filter and drill down into the data to test your hypothesis. Rinse and repeat as clues emerge. Present findings with recommendations. Finally, take action.
This approach is less than ideal for several reasons:
- Time consuming: Typical analysis is highly manual and takes hours or days
- Bias prone: Manual analysis involves assumptions and hypothesis leading to potential bias
- Limited Analysis: It’s impossible to spot “unknown unknowns” if the universe of analysis is only a subset of the total variables
- Bottlenecks: Analysis is limited to analysts wielding both SQL and business skills
- Data Movement: Data extracts or aggregations from the cloud DW/lake typically must be moved in-memory to apply
The Solution: Pushdown Insights
Tellius’s solution is Live Insights. Live Insights are fast, automated insights run inside cloud DWs. Live Insights identifies trend drivers, compares cohorts, and spots anomalies by automatically analyzing combinations of the many factors in the data. They surface the most impactful underlying contributors of performance at a deep, granular level against the most up-to-date cloud data. Live Insights build on Tellius’s existing AI-driven automation and natural language interfaces by leveraging cloud DW’s native architecture to optimally push-down both interactive query and generation of insights.
For example, users can type, ask, or voice “show me electronics revenue in Los Angeles weekly.” The resulting visualization not only shows the trend, but also highlights any outliers in the trend. Clicking on any point in the visualization, users can dig deeper to find the reasons why the metric increased or decreased from the prior period. Here, the system automatically scans through the underlying data to identify the top contributors of change. With Live Insights, a series of SQL queries are sent to the data warehouse to examine the various combinations in the data to highlight, for example, which products, stores, zip codes, or customer types most impacted the change in revenue.
The example above is called a Trend Driver Insight. Another example is called a Cohort Analysis which compares two sets of customers or transactions to identify the differences between performance of the two groups. This is useful for marketing teams, for example, to understand the underlying reasons why campaign performance differs between social channels compared to paid search channels.
As companies increasingly adopt a modern data stack, Tellius meets the need for a modern decision intelligence layer sitting on top of that stack that effectively leverages the power of the cloud data warehouse. With Live Insights, business users and analysts will be able to better understand what is happening with business metrics, why metrics change, and how to impact business outcomes, going from data-to-insights in just mere minutes.
Start a free trial of Tellius decision intelligence today.
