My name is John Karas and I'm a Product Manager here at Quickbase. I'm super excited to share with you that on Tuesday April 27th, we launched our Platform Analytics feature into general availability! All customers who are on New plans (anyone with Read entitlements in their contract) will now receive this feature as part of their subscription.
Since I started at Quickbase in 2018, I’ve continuously heard how customers wanted more visibility into how their no-code innovation ecosystem is being used. Quickbase can be used for just about any process you want track, improve, extend, or report on, so the idea of being able to see insights into what is occurring across all your Apps, all your Users, and all your Connections is something that really resonated with all the customers I’ve talked with in my experience.
In early 2020, we embarked on the journey to achieving this vision. Our Design and User Experience (UX) team developed initial sketches of what things could look like in this future world. Then our Engineering team went to work and built out an awesome prototype that we unveiled for you at Virtual Empower 2020 in the Product Keynote (shameless plug: if you’re reading this, we need to see you at Virtual Empower 2021 on May 25th through May 27th! We have some fabulous updates to share with you again). The reaction to the prototype demo (at the time called “Platform Insights”) really encouraged our team & our company to continue towards this vision.
In the months that followed, we continued to make progress and launched our Alpha version in November 2020. This is an excellent way for our Product team to continue getting feedback, while giving a handful of customers a first taste of what they would be receiving. We even did 1x1 Usability Study sessions with them to truly uncover how intuitive their first interactions with this new product area were.
On a related area of evolution, as we entered 2021, Quickbase committed to offering customers the option to purchase their contract on usage-based plans. Our company had tested the waters in 2019 and 2020, and received such great reaction to the use-cases that customers could achieve if they didn’t have to think in terms of a per-user-cost for every single solution they wanted to build on Quickbase, that it was clear we had to offer this more broadly. This especially resonated with customers who have 100s / 1000s of infrequent users, or want to extend Quickbase solutions to their customers.
With Platform Analytics, all customers on our New plans (which you can purchase as a user-based plan OR a usage-based plan) are now clearly able to see their key value metrics. Platform Analytics is now the 1 concise, centralized, trusted location within product to view 1) key contractual metrics relating to your contract & 2) key usage metrics to showcase the value that you’re organization is receiving from this no-code innovation platform.
The Overview page is the first area of functionality within Platform Analytics that is generally available (with the Drilldown page coming later this year). Below you will find out more detail about this feature:
Where is it located, and what users have access?
- Realm and Account Admins can go into an Account’s “Admin Console”, and find the new tab named “Platform Analytics” towards the top
-
What’s awesome about this feature?
- There are quick summaries of 8 key usage metrics (see the screenshot attached), displayed in Number-style & Gauge-style tiles.... Number-style tiles articulate key value metrics that are unlimited / not independently capped…. Gauge-style tiles articulate capped entitlements that have limits
- Daily app users = This metric showcases the depth, breadth, and frequency of how your organization is utilizing Quickbase.
- It is calculated by looking at the # of active Users, in each App, each day... then sums it up and we present you an average over your last 7 days.
- So if Billy used 5 apps today, and Maria used 7 apps today, that would count as 12 DAU...
- Total reads = This metric is the combined total of your User reads & Integration reads (see the 2 metrics below)
- User reads = The total number of times Quickbase displayed any of the following: Form / record, Report, and Dashboard
- Integration reads = This metric is the total number of times Quickbase delivered data via an integration or API, or any Read through the "Everyone on the Internet" functionality
- “Billable Step Runs” from Pipelines are automatically included in the Integration Reads tile, so customers no longer need to check multiple places to understand where they are at on their entitlements!
- Days into contract period = This metric shows you the number of days elapsed since your current contract period began, compared to the total number of days in this period.
- Users with access = This metric shows you the number of user licenses that are currently provisioned, compared to the number of user licenses purchased... Most customers are familiar with this metric
- File attachment space = This metric shows you the amount of file attachment space that your apps currently use, compared to the amount purchased... Most customers are familiar with this metric
- App space = This metric shows you the amount of space your apps currently use, compared to the amount purchased... Most customers are familiar with this metric
- Daily app users = This metric showcases the depth, breadth, and frequency of how your organization is utilizing Quickbase.
- Note: Quickbase will not stop any product/workflow functionality (including Pipelines) for customers on New plans that exceed a capped entitlement; it instead triggers a conversation with the Quickbase account team & the customer
- Platform Analytics does the thinking for you, by automatically determining whether each metric tile should be Gauge-style or Number-style, based on what each customer has in their contract for purchased entitlements
- There are easy ‘i’ icons to learn the definitions of each metric
-
Is there a Help page for this new product area?
- Yes, here is the documentation we recently published: https://help.quickbase.com/user-assistance/platform_analytics.htm
What’s up next for Quickbase on its journey to "provide customers more visibility into how their no-code innovation ecosystem is being used"?
- In addition to maintaining & enhancing the Overview page, we are focused on progressing the Drilldown page of Platform Analytics to General Availability (currently in Beta). This functionality lets users drill into trends-over-time of the Daily App Users metric (plus User Reads & Integrations Reads in the future), and slice-and-dice them by App, User, or App+User... This area of functionality is extremely exciting, and will enable Admins to compare app adoption trends, see which Apps are consuming the most User Reads, investigate what Pipelines are driving the most Integration Reads, and many more use cases... Below you can see a quick screenshot of where we are heading on this front
-
- Additionally, we are focused on extending the Platform Analytics experience to our next audience: App Builders… We’ve started designed/prototyping a sister-feature: “App Analytics”. We had a global Design workshop with 7 customers earlier in April 2021, and have some AWESOME things coming 😊. More to share on this soon.
I hope this helps you understand more about our new Platform Analytics feature, how we got to this point, and where we are heading. Be on the lookout for more announcements about our upcoming work!
-John Karas
