Enjoy the View With the New Site Roll-Ups Feature

Well, it's another new month and with that comes more new features. Frankly speaking, it is getting difficult to keep up with the speed of our developers so many of these cool new features aren't getting written about or given the credit they deserve.

The best way to keep us is to check out the Visual KPI release notes every week or so.

Ok, on to the latest customer-driven feature...

Visual KPI Site Roll-Ups

This one is specific to users of our Enterprise Edition, as it really shines for customers that manage multiple sites, departments, geographic locations, etc. In the past, running multiple instances of Visual KPI meant just that - separate. Now, with Site Roll-Ups you can 'roll up' multiple sites to not only see what it going on inside of multiple sites, but also drill-in, expand for more details, map them (using GeoMaps), filter, sort and more. Here's a quick video about the feature (oh, and we just used the browser in this video, but of course it works on smartphones, tablets and almost any other connected device you can find):

• Existing Enterprise Edition customer? All new features are free, so just sign in to your account and upgrade to the latest version. 
• Starter or Pro user? Contact us for details about upgrading to Enterprise Edition or just reply to this email. 
• New to Visual KPI? Sign up for the 30-day trial and we'll get Visual KPI up and running on one of your servers in just 90 minutes. 

A big thanks to the customers who requested this and helped us define it.

Please let us know what you think by contacting us.

Best,
Robert and team Transpara

Introducing Group Trends

Ad-Hoc Multi-Pen Trends from Any List in Seconds

Powerful trending features have always been one of the key reasons people buy Visual KPI and we are proud to announce yet another update (did you see the last one?).

The 'Group Trend' feature adds the ability to instantly select a few (up to 10) KPIs or Values from any list (list view, bar chart view, etc) and instantly create an ad-hoc trend of their actual values. As you would expect from us, this works across multiple data sources.

Click below to check out a video and be sure to let us know what you think!

Data Refresh Rate: Just How Fast Can It Go?

We just received a question from one of our prospective customers following an OSIsoft PI System on mobile webinar yesterday.  It went something like this:

"In this morning’s webinar, it was mentioned that the refresh rate of the application at this customer was set to 30 seconds. We would be interested in higher refresh rates… possibly, 10 seconds or sooner. We would want PI data to be viewable to Transpara Visual KPI with a minimum of latency. Can you comment on the feasibility of data being viewable in Transpara within 10 seconds or less after originating in PI?"

Great question, and the answer was good enough we thought everyone would benefit.  Oh, and the answer is not just for those using OSIsoft PI - it applies to all of our supported data sources.

Here's are the details...

The cache interval is set by each customer in the Visual KPI Server Manager according to their needs (see image below). This interval determines how quickly we refresh our cached data from each data source. 

Cache interval is a “wait time” between executions and it can be safely set all the way to zero seconds. This means each time cache runs, we wait zero seconds before starting the cache cycle again. Since each execution cycle depends on the number of values being fetched (we batch them in groups of 5000 for efficiency) the cache execution time is what determines the “freshness” of our data.

Here's a critical point: We do not cache most data at all.  We only cache some data in order to maintain referential integrity among all screens where data from lots of sources might live (KPI Maps, List Views, Rollup Bars, etc).  In contrast, trends (as one example) when invoked cause an immediate call to the data source, guaranteeing you the absolute latest data, up to the millisecond of the request. All trends also support Auto Play, a feature that uses HTML5 asynchronous callbacks to smoothly scroll any trend in any browser on any device. These callbacks typically occur every 3 seconds so trends appear to smoothly scroll right to left.

To summarize, we get data right from the source wherever possible so there is a near-zero delay, and in cases where we are combining multiple sources, you can turn the cache down to zero seconds, limiting the speed only by the number of values being fetched.

Hope this helps.  Please leave a comment if you have any questions about the post.

Meet the New Interactive HTML5 Trend Chart

You have seen hints of this, and maybe you even had a chance to see the beta version of it at the OSIsoft User's Conference a few months ago, but now it is live and we've got it on video to show off all of the features.  Let's jump right to it...

Simply put, the trend (or line chart) is one of the most critical parts of what we do and always has been.  For anyone who cares about performance monitoring and KPIs there are really two key measures: 'how am I doing right now?', and 'how am I doing over time (the trend)?'  OK, I guess you could say that 'how am I doing compared to x?' would also fit in that list, but the trend covers that as well.

So, here are some of the new features for summer 2012: 

• It's HTML5, but still works with non-HTML5 browsers and on older phones
• It's faster - not sure how much, but a lot
• It's more interactive - you can zoom (tap, pinch, mouse, rubber band, scroll wheel, etc.), drag, lock cursors, export, toggle on/off pens.  There are multiple modes: box-zoom (just when you have a mouse), drag, cursor (live cursors!), cursor lock, etc.
• It supports gestures on touch-based devices (smartphones, tablets and even Windows 8).  Swipe, scroll, pinch, and more.
• It's ALIVE! - a new feature called 'autoplay' will fetch data from your data source as fast as it updates, so you can watch the trend change in front of your eyes.  This is especially handy for fast-moving or volatile data.
• It's smart - let's say you have a trend with thousands of points of data on it, but you are holding a smart phone with a screen that only has a few hundred pixels to work with.  Should you send across all of the data anyway?  Of course not.  That would be a huge waste of bandwidth and useless, but in the past when you zoomed in we had to refresh the page for you.  Now the trend is smart enough to fill in the exact amount of data (fresh from the data source) as you change your view.  Zoom in, and the trend will show more detail (and vice versa).  Drag left or right and the trend will automatically get the exact amount of data.  Rather that give hundred of examples, I suggest you go to the demo site below and zoom or drag the trend left or right and watch (especially when zooming) the peaks and valleys of the trend change.  Also not the speed - this data is coming from an OSIsoft PI System in California to wherever you are.  Here's the link: http://bit.ly/PiNwir

Give the new trend a try!

iPhone / iPad  |  Android  |  BlackBerry  |  Windows Phone  |  PC & Mac

So, what next?

• See the trend in action on your own smartphone, tablet or browser.  Click here!
• Existing customer?  Just upgrade to the latest version
• Haven't tried it yet?  Sign up for a 30-day pilot and we will put Visual KPI on one of your servers (or VMs) and set it up in just 90 minutes over the web.  No obligation. 

New Video: Mobile BI at the 2012 OSIsoft Users Conference

Next week is a big one for us here at Transpara.  It's time for the annual OSIsoft Users Conference in San Francisco, CA and we are proud to be the platinum sponsor. 

As you may know, many of our customers rely on OSIsoft PI and other real-time data historians as a primary master source of data and we do too (our mobile bi demo sites all run PI and SQL Server).

Over the past couple of weeks we put together the following video to showcase Visual KPI for all of the attendees.  It will be on the TVs in the hotel rooms, at our booth in the partner area, and anywhere else they will let us show it.

Let us know what you think, and please stop by to say hello if you will be at the event!

Need more?  Download our free mobile BI guide or sign up for a free pilot!