Atomic’s new Insights dashboard - v2!

An upgrade to the Atomic workbench’s insights screen has been a long time coming, and it is finally here. We have entirely replaced the backend system used by the dashboard to ensure stability, timely results, and our own ability to extend and adapt the dashboard to the growing needs of our customers.

All customer now have this new experience available by clicking the insights navigation item in the left-hand nav in the Atomic Workbench.

An old assumption

For a while at Atomic we worked on the assumption that our customers would control the orchestration around Atomic, and that the Atomic system would fit in to our customer’s own data flows. We had an image in our heads of our customers ingesting events from the Atomic platform and using those to automate sending of Atomic cards, managing of their own dashboards/data lakes, and making API calls to update systems based on form data captured in Atomic.

This assumption grossly oversimplified the complex tech world that we are living in, and didn’t match the reality of the situation. As we realised this over time we’ve changed our mindset to try and break down the barriers between our customers and the data that Atomic emits - the perfect example of this is Atomic Action Flows, where the orchestration of multiple card sends, system updates and data capture can be managed entirely in the Atomic system.

This same assumption led to us under-investing in Atomic’s metric dashboarding tools, under the assumption that our customers would run their own dashboard tooling to display metrics that are most relevant to them.

A change in approach

Since launching the new Action Flows editor earlier this year, we have also followed up with the Activity and Overview tabs where you can see how your Action Flows are performing directly from the editor. This is one way that we are taking responsibility for displaying - and being opinionated about - what matters with the events that Atomic emits. However, these screens don’t match the level of granularity that is available in the insights dashboard and are not a complete replacement for it as such we’ve also been spending time enhancing this dashboard.

The new backend

The new insights dashboard uses a new backend system using AWS Athena as its foundation. The previous backend used a Postgres database which became unfit for purpose at higher levels of scale. Using AWS Athena we are able to respond to complex queries for a lot of data in a short amount of time.

It has not been a straightforward road to get this point! Over the last year we have experimented with three different backend technologies, each time rebuilding the core functionality of the Insights dashboard with each new system. We are confident in AWS Athena as the correct choice because we can compare it to the other systems which had different pros and cons. Some performed about as well as Athena but would have added significant maintenance overhead to our engineering teams to keep running, others only provided minimal performance boost over the old Postgres backend.

What else is new?

Aside from being slow at scale, our old backend was risky and cumbersome to update when we wanted to query new data or change how our queries worked. Our new backend system allows us to quickly iterate over the data we store and the queries we run against that data. Because of this, we’ve been able to add a few new features at launch time of the new insights dashboard

New Filters

• The new dashboard allows choosing multiple Action Flows and cards within those Action Flows to see data for. The old dashboard allowed only filtering by one at a time, or seeing data for all cards.

• As with cards and Action Flows, multiple streams can be filtered by as well. Previously only a single stream, or all streams could be used in a filter.

• The new dashboard also allows filtering by test, live or all data types. This means you can ignore your test sends and see only the data that really matters to you.

Visibility of push notification sends

The new dashboard includes a tile that shows the number of push notifications sent and how many have been received.

Additional detail

All of the tiles are now clickable to open up a right-hand panel on the dashboard. This panel contains additional information explaining the data in the tile. For some tiles additional event data is displayed here.

• For the snooze tile a breakdown is shown of how often certain snooze periods have been used

• For the links-clicked tile a breakdown is shown of which links in your Atomic cards have been clicked, and how many cards they have been clicked in

• For the feedback tile the count of “I see this too often” and “It’s not relevant” negative feedbacks are provided, alongside a list of the most recent custom feedback (with any PII redacted).