MicroStrategy - Why, When & Where ??
Updated June 11, 2016
MicroStrategy - Why, When & Where ??
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
Analytics Desktop
Overall Satisfaction with MicroStrategy Analytics
Microstrategy is used as a reporting solution in my work environment. Microstrategy is used to interact on Hadoop, Microsoft SQL Server Tables, and SSAS MDX Cubes. Microstrategy's Visual Insight is used as a self service tool replacing Pivot tables & graph building in Excel.
- Visual Insight is a very good tool for data discovery and for create quick dashboard presentation. This is is basically a online web based portal where you have capability to quickly slice & dice the data . Also it provides you options to create derived metrics & derived attribute (MSTR 10) with various mathematical or statistical functions. One of the major mention would be the map based data visualization where you can plot data based on Latitude & Longitude.Also with MSTR 10 following limitations were removed i) using hyperlink ii) HTML 5 is implemented instead of Flash ,so easy to be rendered in mobile too iii) Adding images is possible for hardcoding company logo & symbols
- Drilling Capabilities. This requires some good backend data modeling. Once you bring in all the facts and dimensions you are supposed to establish relationship between them & create hierarchies. Then it would be easy to drill more & more. For example - Device hierarchy - (Device Used by User--> Browser-->Operating System)
- Data Source Connectivity.
- Enterprise Manager is basically BI to BI environment which is used by administrators or executives to track reporting usage, report performance,developer efficiency or frequency of usage & thousands of other statistics which proves to be very helpful in monitoring the efficiency of the whole environment. Once you set up Enterprise miner( which is a bit tricky) you will be able to access all the in built documents or you can custom built dashboard based on your usage
- Visual Insight have multiple limitations. Few of them are listed here - i)Cannot change default graph colors ii) text/graph formatting are very very limited iii)Add metric to Color by / Thresholds is not possible iv)one of the worst limitation of the VI in older versions is that it is not possible to create filters that apply only to a specific visualization. For example if there are 4 graphs in one dashboard & if you have filters then those filters would be applicable for all of them
- Some formatting options are not there either on Web or Developer especially while dealing with a document. We have to use both Web & Developer to solve issues.
- While connecting with MDX cube reporting loses a lot of features.