Smart Insights

Smart Insights uses statistical analysis to automatically provide insights to better help you understand your data.

What Smart Insights Can Do for You

When you look at a chart or table, there's always more to understand about what's going on in your data. With Smart Insights, you can explore beyond the data that is readily visible to you at first glance.

What Are Smart Insights?

Smart Insights take the form of a textual insight combined with a visualization to provide you with as much information as possible about your selected data point or variance. These insights are presented to you within your story in the Smart Insights panel.

When Can I Get Smart Insights?

You can get Smart Insights on your acquired data or live SAP HANA connections when working with most chart types, tables cells, and all variance types in stories. Smart Insights supports both classic account models and new model types.

Note

For information on using Smart Insights with live SAP HANA connections, see Setting up Smart Insights for Live SAP HANA Direct Connections.

To learn more about the different model types, see Get Started with the New Model Type.

If Explorer is enabled on the visualization from which it's triggered, Smart Insights are also available in the Explorer view, and the Digital Boardroom.
Note

When using the context menu to access Smart Insights from a cell in a table in Digital Boardroom, the (Explorer) icon appears in the wheel once Enable Explorer is selected in the builder panel. This opens Explorer mode, and Smart Insights is then enabled at this level. If Enable Explorer is not selected in the builder panel, then the wheel can still appear, without the (Explorer) option.

Note
Smart Insights aren't available when working with:
  • Cross calculations
  • Account dimensions that have multiple hierarchies
  • Calculated columns created in tables. For more information about these types of calculations, please refer to the chapter called Creating Calculations from Table Rows or Columns.
  • Blended models
  • Embedded mode
  • Multiple data points selected in a chart or table

Chart Types that Support Smart Insights

Smart Insights are supported on many chart types.

The Smart Insights functionality is available for these chart types:

  • Comparison:

    • Bar/Column

    • Combination Column & Line

    • Combination Stacked Column & Line

    • Stacked Bar/Column

  • Trend:

    • Area

    • Line

  • Distribution:

    • Heat Map

    • Radar

    • Tree Map

  • More:

    • Donut

    • Marimekko

    • Pie

Restrictions

  • If a dimension in your hierarchy has over 200 K nodes, the top contributor insight for that specific dimension is based on the level of the leaf node, not the other hierarchical levels.
  • Smart Insights won't return top contributor insights if the returned result sets for the top contributor queries from the backend is more than 1 million rows.
Related Information