Effective Incident Management Using Embedded Analytics
Introduction
In the present market, a key objective of organizations is growth. The more a company grows, the more incidents occur, unavoidably, and are reported. In this blog, I am going to give you a walkthrough of the benefits of using embedded analytics in your incident management system with the following subtopics:
- What is embedded analytics?
- Benefits of embedded analytics in an incident management dashboard.
- Bold BI’s Incident Management Dashboard example.
- How to embed analytical tools into support domain apps.
What is embedded analytics?
Embedded analytics is the integration of analytical solutions and data visualization capabilities into a software application’s user interface to improve data comprehension and usability. Bold BI helps you easily embed an analytics solution into your everyday work applications using a JavaScript SDK and server application. You can manage incidents in your company by monitoring in a dashboard and resolving them with data-driven methodology.
Benefits of embedded analytics in an incident management monitoring dashboard
Incidents distract from normal business operations when not managed. Using embedded analytics in your organization lets you monitor incidents’ occurrence over time, which helps to manage your business smoothly. Your incident control team can monitor incident-related metrics, implement strategies to overcome incidents based on impact and urgency, and reduce incidents over time. Here are the key benefits of using an embedded dashboard in your application:
- Efficient incident management.
- Better troubleshooting.
- Effective planning.
Efficient Incident Management Process
Embedded analytics helps team leads optimize incident management over time by monitoring key metrics and KPIs such as resolved incidents, incident status, unresolved incidents by category, and unresolved incidents. These enable them to track the performance of their team and detect where the bottlenecks in their incident management process are occurring. They can then seek solutions, knowing exactly where to start. They can also observe which teams or individuals solve which kinds of incidents best in order to inform both training decisions and incident assignments.
Better Troubleshooting
Embedded analytics gives a visualization of key metrics such as incidents by category and searchable incident report summaries. By looking at trends in these metrics, managers can detect underlying issues causing spikes of incidents faster. If a part of a whole is malfunctioning, incident teams can work with product managers to figure out which part that is and whether or not there’s a design flaw. If multiple people have requested similar fixes or features, the incident team can see that with simple manipulation of a dashboard’s widgets, then link their reports and increase the priority of that change.
Effective Planning
For any kind of business, collecting incident reports is crucial to proper record keeping. Many companies have forms ready to fill out. This organization makes this information prime for data mining. Whether they are reports of accidents, weather damage, theft, encounters with upset customers, or just the malfunctioning of equipment, viewing the data of incidents in a dashboard will make patterns stand out. The more you know about why incidents are happening, the better you can plan to prevent future incidents. For example, in the case of theft, a store can compare the dates and times that merchandise goes missing with how many and which employees were working and the sales figures for those times. Theft prevention plans will be more effective if managers know what repeat shoplifters are looking for, like busy registers.
Bold BI’s Incident Management Dashboard example
The ServiceNow Incident Management Dashboard example monitors incidents dealt with by an incident team over time. It tracks information regarding the average resolution time for an incident and the status of the incidents based on category and priority.
With the Incident Management Monitoring Dashboard, you can track key metrics and KPIs such as:
- Average time to resolution.
- Incident status.
- Resolved/unresolved incidents.
- New incidents.
- New incident by category.
- Created/closed incidents.
Average time to resolution
This radial gauge shows the average time to resolution for one incident.
Incident status
This heat map shows the total incident count in each status and their priority levels.
Resolved/unresolved incidents
This spline chart shows the number of resolved and unresolved incidents by date.
New incidents
This line chart shows the total number of newly created incidents by date. It helps the support team manager have an overview of trends in the occurrence of incidents.
New incidents by category
This doughnut chart shows the percentages of newly created incidents by category.
Created/closed incidents
This column chart shows the total of created and closed incidents over the last six months.
To learn more about the metrics and KPIs used in this dashboard example, refer to the Incident Management Dashboard demo.
How to embed analytical tools into support domain apps
Let’s see how analytics can be embedded into your support domain web applications. Bold BI helps you embed your dashboards on 18 web platforms including React with ASP.NET Core, React with Go, WinForms, Node.js, Vue with Go, Vue with ASP.NET Core, and more. In this blog, I am going to explain how to embed dashboards in your ASP.NET MVC applications. Consider a scenario in which your software developers have a website like the one shown in the following image.
You can embed dashboards easily using Bold BI and avoid building an analytics or BI solution yourself. Follow these steps to embed your dashboard successfully.
Prerequisites
Download and install the Bold BI server on your local machine and create an enterprise-grade dashboard. You can find the installation and deployment instructions here.
Step 1: Create an ASP.NET MVC application.
First, create an ASP.NET MVC application. Open Microsoft Visual Studio and click New Project. Then choose ASP.NET MVC Web Application, enter the project name, and click OK.
Step 2: Configure embedded properties.
After the ASP.NET MVC web application is created, you need to create a model class called EmbedProperties under Models and provide the dashboard RootURL, site identifier, environment, user email, and embed secret.
RootUrl : Bold BI dashboard server URL. For example: http://localhost:5000/bi.SiteIdentifier : For Bold BI, it should be something like “site/site1.” For the Bold BI Cloud Analytics Server, it should be an empty string.Environment : Your Bold BI application environment. If using Bold BI Cloud Analytics Server, you should use “cloud.” If using Bold BI, you should use “enterprise.”User Email : Bold BI server will use an email to authorize the authorization server.
Step 3: Generate embed secret.
You have to set the embed secret for authentication. You can get it from the Bold BI server. Click the Settings icon in the left navigation bar and then click the Embed tab. Click Enable embed authentication and then click Generate Secret to generate the embed secret. Copy the secret key and paste it into the application. To learn how to do this in more detail, you can refer to this documentation link.
Note: Save the secret key, as it cannot be retrieved again. If you do not save it, you will have to generate a new one using the Reset Secret option.
Step 4: Create an authorization server.
You need to implement an authorization server in the ASP.NET MVC application to get authenticated before embedding the dashboard from the Bold BI server. You can also configure the single sign-on (SSO)-based authorization server, which is an authentication endpoint that enables users to securely authenticate multiple applications using unique embed secrets. This prevents the need for the user to log into different applications separately.
Step 5: Create Bold BI instance.
Finally, create a Bold BI instance to load the dashboard using a JavaScript file. Reference required script files and CSS files in HTML pages.
Step 6: Run the application to embed the dashboard.
After creating the ASP.NET MVC application, you need to run it. It will be launched with the dashboard details. Finally, you can see the dashboard created in the Bold BI server is embedded in your web application.
By following the previous steps, you can embed your dashboards into your ASP.NET MVC application.
To learn more about embedding dashboards into your applications, please refer to this blog. You can also download the sample code used in the previous steps from our documentation.
Conclusion
Bold BI helps you integrate dashboards in your applications written in ASP.NET Core, ASP.NET MVC, Angular, ASP.NET, and Ruby on Rails. It will help save you time and prevent you from doing redundant work. Click this link to explore its features. To learn more about embedding dashboards into your application, refer to this blog and our help documentation.
I hope now you have a better understanding of Bold BI and how it can help incident management be more successful. You can create any kind of dashboard you like with Bold BI’s 35+ widgets and 130+ data sources.
Get started with Bold BI by signing up for a free 15-day trial and create interactive business intelligence dashboards. You can contact us by submitting questions through the Bold BI website or, if you already have an account, you can log in to submit your support questions.
Originally published at https://www.boldbi.com on June 23, 2022.
