BI

[Gilbert09]

BI TODOs

What's the goal of this?

Short-term, to replicate our go/revenue dashboard in PostHog. Long-term, allow users to effortlessly query and analyze their business data in PostHog.

This list is pretty incomplete and only focuses on the short-term right now. There's plenty more to come here from the Data Warehouse side, such as some DBT-like integration - more to come on this later.

Step 1: Make it work

• Render a simple line chart of dates/numbers from a query
  • Tooltips feat(bi): added tooltips to line charts posthog#19133
  • PostHog graph styling feat(bi): added tooltips to line charts posthog#19133
• Add to dashboards fix(bi): fix styling issues with data viz nodes being added to dashboards posthog#19122
  • Query summary on dashboard item "details"
• Allow multiple series to be selected feat(bi): allow multiple Y-series posthog#19083
• Add goal lines feat(bi): added support for goal lines on BI charts posthog#19185
  • Option to change goal label placement
• Add bar charts feat(bi): added bar charts to BI posthog#19161
  • Add stacked bar charts feat(bi): Added stacked bar charts posthog#23991
  • Add area charts feat(BI): Added area charts to BI posthog#23975
• Format chart values
  • Prefix/suffix feat(BI): Series settings posthog#24082
  • Number/percentage formatting feat(BI): Series settings posthog#24082
  • Support floating point numbers feat(bi): Added support for decimal numbers in BI posthog#24103
• Add chart labels
  • Label axis
  • Show legend
  • Hide x-axis values
  • X-axis datetime formatting

Step 2: Make it good

• Linked cells in tables feat(bi): Implemented a naive version of links for BI posthog#24013
• Add trend lines feat(bi): Bunch of features for BI posthog#24188
• Global dashboard filters
  • Add back in the {filters} options feat(data-warehouse): Added the ability to use dashboard filters in BI queries posthog#24033
  • Be able to add "named" filters to a dashboard to use in a query
• Add other chart types
  • Area feat(BI): Added area charts to BI posthog#23975
  • Stacked bars feat(bi): Added stacked bar charts posthog#23991
  • Pie
  • Bold text with relative movement (+33% compared to previous period)
• Support async queries
• Start Y axis at a value other than 0 feat(bi): Allow BI graphs to not start at zero posthog#24142
• Breakdown by X-axis value
• Multiple chart types (line on a bar chart) feat(bi): Bunch of features for BI posthog#24188
• Multiple X-axis (left & right) feat(bi): Bunch of features for BI posthog#24188
• Option to stack 100% feat(bi): Added 100% stacked bar charts posthog#24145
• Y-Axis scale (linear, power, log) feat(bi): Bunch of features for BI posthog#24188
• Select series colour
• Label series feat(bi): Bunch of features for BI posthog#24188
• Be able to hide a series on the chart, but display the value in the tooltip
• Add number formatting to big number chart type (e.g. commas) feat(bi): Bunch of features for BI posthog#24188
• Column formatting
  • Similar to chart series formatting, but apply them to table columns feat(bi): Added the ability to customise table columns posthog#24236
  • Conditional formatting feat(bi): Table conditional formatting posthog#24954
• Add custom columns run by Hog
• Add goal line labels to the tooltip on hover (https://posthog.slack.com/archives/C019RAX2XBN/p1724253483927809)
• Update row limit copy to show "first n rows" (https://posthog.slack.com/archives/C019RAX2XBN/p1724246294950009)
• Show row numbers on the table view
• Adjustable column widths
  • Scrollable table vs non-scrollable table
• Threshold alerting
• Display a warning when there are duplicate X-axis values (can happen if there is an additional X-axis column)
  • Ideally we also sum these values by default so that we don't show duplicates (this is what Metabase does)
• Allow changing colors of breakdown series

Step 3: Make it complete

• ???
• Profit

Bugs

• Resizing viz insights on dashboards - fix(bi): Fixed resizing of data viz tiles and some css fixes for BI posthog#20139
• Adding a viz insight on a dashboard shows the refresh button until the page is refreshed
• Posthog 3000 tabs and content don't quite look right
• Floating point numbers get rounded on line graphs (https://posthog.slack.com/archives/C0368RPHLQH/p1702399650882769) feat(bi): Added support for decimal numbers in BI posthog#24103
• Resizing BI visualizations on dashboards makes the user scroll (https://posthoghelp.zendesk.com/agent/tickets/8994) fix(bi): Fixed resizing of data viz tiles and some css fixes for BI posthog#20139
• Show query editor before requesting default query (https://posthog.slack.com/archives/C0368RPHLQH/p1705597079594709?thread_ts=1705592933.720769&cid=C0368RPHLQH) fix(bi): Only show the giant loading icon when not showing the editing UI posthog#20133
• Migration path from the old DataTableNode to DataVisualizationNode in the db - https://posthog.slack.com/archives/C05E85Z93TL/p1719930527072329?thread_ts=1719500250.107749&cid=C05E85Z93TL

Feature Requests

• Sort columns from the UI (https://posthoghelp.zendesk.com/agent/tickets/9211)
• Set more filters from the UI without having to edit the query directly (https://posthoghelp.zendesk.com/agent/tickets/9211)
• BI Hackathon idea - https://posthog.slack.com/archives/CT2BU33N1/p1706788297305829?thread_ts=1706786982.303199&cid=CT2BU33N1
• Add CSV exporting of the table data
• Breakdowns - https://posthog.slack.com/archives/C019RAX2XBN/p1720604394847369
• Predictive values from incomplete time series - https://posthog.slack.com/archives/C0368RPHLQH/p1727988916798489

[timgl]

Possibly related: Easily browse available tables to query next to the SQL editor.

[dannysheridan]

Right now at Fern (YC W23) I'm using Google Sheets to track the following KPIs weekly:

• ARR (broken down by product; new revenue; churned revenue)
• Number of customers
• Avg revenue per customer

Would love to use a PostHog dashboard that brought in this data from Stripe. (Stripe's default dashboard views are insufficiently customizable.)

Watching this!

[timgl]

@dannysheridan If you enable these two in feature previews, you can go to "data warehouse" and set up a Stripe source, so we'll automatically pull in your data from stripe into the data warehouse! Let us know if you have feedback.

[dannysheridan]

Hey @timgl it took me longer than I would have expected to find feature previews. I raised a PR to improve the docs here.

[dannysheridan]

Enabling the Stripe connection was harder than expected as well.

Steps for folks in the future

1. Get your account id in the top right corner here: https://dashboard.stripe.com/settings/account
2. Get your API key here: https://dashboard.stripe.com/apikeys/create (Note: I created a restricted key that had read only access to certain data.)

Once connected, I was brought back to this screen and I think I just need to wait for data to load (hopefully?)

[annikaschmid]

@Gilbert09 One user last week mentioned that dashboard filters don't apply to queries on the dashboard, which is true. In Metabase, I know you can add variables to your query and then connect the query with a dashboard filter. It's probably not at the top of the to do list, but would be good to have at some point. Otherwise it can cause confusion, especially once we have visualisations and SQL queries are harder to differentiate from regular graphs. How does a user know whether the dashboard filter is applied or not?

[timgl]

@dannysheridan Have created a PR to address some of these issues! PostHog/posthog#19664

[isAdrisal]

As a feature request, I would like a histogram chart type to be available as a visualisation with an "auto" and configurable bucket size.

It's workaroundable now with bar charts and manually creating the buckets in the query, but having it as an easy 2-click visualisation would be much nicer.

If I had to rank how important this is to me versus adding back {filters}, I'd give {filters} a 10/10 and histograms a 4/10.

[abigailbramble]

Please can you add comma separations for thousands into the data visualization tiles:

context: https://posthoghelp.zendesk.com/agent/tickets/16427

[Gilbert09]

Please can you add comma separations for thousands into the data visualization tiles:

context: posthoghelp.zendesk.com/agent/tickets/16427

@abigailbramble This has been released now!

[isAdrisal]

Feature request: add "show row numbers" as a table formatting option. Helps to quickly reference the position of a result when rows are sorted by a meaningful column (eg. date or count).

I'd imagine it looking like a small number to the left of each row (similar to Google Sheets, or Excel).