Metric Insights

Fullstory automatically generates metric insights when there are interesting trends or anomalies in your data. This helps you quickly identify thought-provoking patterns or concerning changes at a glance.

Benefits of Metric Insights

Metric insights reduce the time to value.

Interpreting value from a metric trend chart takes time. When visiting metrics on a daily cadence, you may not catch every insight that may have risen from the data on a weekly or monthly view. Because metric insights evaluate the metric against previous weeks or months, Fullstory can spot trends that may not have been obvious.

Everyone sees the same insight.

Metric insights ensures that across the whole organization, everyone gets the same value with way less work. Instead of multiple people in your organization interpreting the value from the same metric and repeating that process with other metrics, everyone can view the same insights from Metrics.

Metric insights can be shared.

Having to share a metric via URL or screenshot and self annotate what is happening for other people to understand can be a cumbersome task. Thankfully, you can easily share metric insights with users across your organization so they can view the exact insight with a description and data visualization.

Types of Metric Insights

There are three types of metric insights: 

• Average Trend Insight
• Volatility Trend Insight
• Average and Gap Trend Insight

Average Trend

When the current average value is compared to a previous average value and there is a significant change, we will detect and report the direction (increase/decrease) of the change along with the percentage or exponential change when comparing the two averages. The trend average insight is available only when data is bucketed daily. It does not currently support when data is bucketed by weeks or months.

Volatility Trend

This insight points out the change in standard deviation of the current timeframe compared to the average standard deviation across a previous time frame. This reports the direction (increase/decrease) of the volatility change along with the percentage change when comparing the two averages.

Average and Gap Trend

This insight type is only found on trend metrics with grouped properties. With this type, you can see dimensionalized views of your metric over time. The values generated are aggregates over the time period you’ve selected from the metric definition. 

It is detected when both of the below scenarios exist:

1. The average value of the top leading property (where ‘leading properties’ are the 1, 2, or 3 top properties/dimensions, determined automatically by a clustering algorithm) has significant change in the current period compared to the average of the leading properties of the previous two weeks.
   • In Fullstory, you can differentiate the leading properties from the other properties by the thickness of the lines (the leading properties are thicker and the other properties are thinner lines).
     
     
2. A significant change in the gap value (a.k.a. distance) between the leading properties and the other properties is found. This can occur when the gap is widening/increasing from the previous weeks compared to the current week or shrinking/decreasing from the previous weeks compared to the current week. 
   • When the gap is widening, that means that the difference in the leading properties and the other properties is growing and getting further apart.
     
     
   • When the gap is shrinking, that means that the difference in value between the leading properties and the other properties is getting smaller and closer together.
     
     

Viewing Metric Insights

There are four primary views for metric insights within Fullstory. 

1. The Metric Index View
2. The Metric Detail View
3. The Insights Detail View
4. Card View

The Metric Index View

From the general library view or the library view of any space, navigate to Metrics. This page provides a list of all active Metrics within your Fullstory account. There is a column labeled Recent Insights. This is the first place you can quickly start to see metric insights in action.

If you do not immediately see any values listed in this column, click the column title to sort the index page view by most recent insights at the top. It’s important to note that this sorts the insights from newest to oldest. If a metric does not show a corresponding value in the Recent Insights column, it can mean a few things:

1. Fullstory hasn’t identified any notable insights for this metric.
   OR
2. Fullstory hasn’t identified any new insights for this metric in the last 7 days.
   
   

By hovering over the Recent Insights column title, you will notice that Fullstory only shows values for metrics that have insights generated in the past 7 days. For example, a value of 1 means there was one insight found in the past 7 days. 

The Metric Detail Page

To learn more about an insight, click on the name of the metric. Then on the following page, click the Insight button in the top right corner.

The button will indicate the number of insights available on the metric, both recent and older. Therefore, this number may be greater than the number originally found back on the Metrics page. This is because Fullstory restricts this page to only showing insights found in the past 7 days. If there is no Insight button found on a metric, that metric has no insights.

The Insight Detail Page

Clicking into any insight on the Metrics page or Metrics detail page will take you to an insight detail page.

At the top right of your screen, you will find a carousel and share button. The carousel will allow you to easily navigate between insights found on the same metric. The share button will give you a way to copy the link to the insight page so that other account users who clicked the shared link can navigate directly to the insight page.

In purple, you will find a detailed text description of the insight. It is intended to complement the data visualization which represents the same information.

To the right of the purple area is an overview of the different components of the insight.

1. Range evaluated: This field is the entire time frame that was used in analyzing the metric.
2. Value change: This field shows the relative change amount of the current value compared to the previous values.
3. Gap change: This field shows the relative change amount of the current gap value compared to the previous gap values. This field is only available on the Average and Gap insight.
4. Type: This field will show the insight type: Trend Average, Trend Volatility or Trend Average and Trend Gap. Hovering over the type shown will show you a general definition of each.

The last area is the data visualization box below the description and overview areas.

• Gray = previous time frames used in evaluation of the insight.
• Purple = indicates the current time frame and insight value.

Card View

You can also access a metric insight from a metric trend card. At the bottom of medium and large cards, there will be a one line description of your metric insight.

FAQs

Is there a cadence for when metric insights are generated?

We rely on new user activity as the mechanism to call for new insights to be generated. User activity is defined as any engagement on the metric data including creating, editing, or viewing the metric. User engagement triggers the algorithm to generate insights that day on those specific metrics that have been interacted with. A lack of user engagement with a metric will result in zero insights generated on that particular metric.

Is there a cadence for when metric insights are deleted?

There are three main cases that will prompt metric insights to be deleted. (Note: Users do not have the ability to delete insights.)

• Case 1: Metric Insights are removed if the underlying metric definition or name of the metric changes. New insights will begin generating in their place to match the updated definition.
• Case 2: The insight expires. If the date the insight was generated crosses over your data retention period, it will be automatically removed.
• Case 3: Redactions and deletions. If a deletion or redaction is processed for your account, any related metric data & insights found, will be removed from the system.

Can an insight highlight stale data that needs attention? 

In certain instances, insights are found on some metrics where activity falls to zero, indicating that the metric or its components are no longer relevant or active, which could prompt an investigation and clean up of your metrics.

Are insights viewable to Guest Users?

No. Users must have a Fullstory user seat to view metric insights.