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

• [x] Render a simple line chart of dates/numbers from a query
  • [x] Tooltips https://github.com/PostHog/posthog/pull/19133
  • [x] PostHog graph styling https://github.com/PostHog/posthog/pull/19133
• [x] Add to dashboards https://github.com/PostHog/posthog/pull/19122
  • [ ] Query summary on dashboard item "details"
• [x] Allow multiple series to be selected https://github.com/PostHog/posthog/pull/19083
• [x] Add goal lines https://github.com/PostHog/posthog/pull/19185
• [x] Add bar charts https://github.com/PostHog/posthog/pull/19161
  • [ ] Add stacked bar charts
• [ ] Format chart values
• [ ] Add chart labels

Step 2: Make it good

• [ ] Linked cells in tables
• [ ] Conditional formatting
• [ ] Add trend lines
• [ ] Global dashboard filters
• [ ] Add other chart types
• [ ] Support async queries
• [ ] Add back in the {filters} options

Step 3: Make it complete

• [ ] ???
• [ ] Profit

Bugs

• [x] Resizing viz insights on dashboards - https://github.com/PostHog/posthog/pull/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)
• [x] Resizing BI visualizations on dashboards makes the user scroll (https://posthoghelp.zendesk.com/agent/tickets/8994) https://github.com/PostHog/posthog/pull/20139
• [x] Show query editor before requesting default query (https://posthog.slack.com/archives/C0368RPHLQH/p1705597079594709?thread_ts=1705592933.720769&cid=C0368RPHLQH) https://github.com/PostHog/posthog/pull/20133

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

[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! https://github.com/PostHog/posthog/pull/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.