Analytic Object Settings
Learn more about the settings available for analytic objects and how to change them.
Who can use this feature?
Users with this profile:
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Basic Model Developer
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Advanced Model Developer
Not sure if you have this feature or capability? Reach out to your administrator.
Overview
Analytic objects have several modifiable settings. These settings allow you to configure the core content and behavior of an analytic object, such as its associated subject or event and its default metric.
General analytic object settings
These general settings are common to multiple types of analytic objects.
Captions
Captions help the user identify a subject member or event occurrence. Use an instance caption to label members or occurrences by their property values; use a secondary caption for additional identification.
If a caption is set, it:
- Displays the property in the Detailed View visual. For example, if Employee's caption is Full Name and secondary caption is Job Name, Detailed View will display Jane Smith, HR Specialist.
- Makes the subject available in the Compare room.
Example:
The property Full Name identifies specific employees. However, this may be an insufficient caption as employees sometimes have the same name, like John Smith. A secondary caption, such as Role or Location, further identifies particular employees.
Data category
A data category represents a dataset loaded into Visier that runs on a unique data load frequency. For this setting, select the data category that you want to this analytic object and its data to be loaded in. In your tenant, you may see the following system-generated data categories:
- Tenant: This data category is the default primary data category.
- Usage: This data category processes Visier usage information.
Additionally, any data categories created by you or your Visier team are available to assign to the analytic object. For more information, see Data Categories.
Data version settings
Visier allows each analytic object to override the globally-defined end date. The end date specifies the range of data that will be loaded into the analytic object.
If the default is used, the global settings specified in the data version are used. If the default toggle is disabled, ensure that overrides are enabled in the data version settings in Data > Data Version Management.
Default metric
The default metric associated with an analytic object is used to generate system alerts and prevent an empty state for charts when your users switch between dimensions that have no relationship to the metric.
If enabled on a subject, default metric allows you to view the subject's history in Detailed View.
After onboarding data, the default metric is an easy way to quickly verify that the data for an object was loaded as intended. For this setting, select a metric that will act as the default metric for the object in visualizations and will be available as a data overview in the studio experience dashboard.
Example:
The Employee subject's default metric is Headcount. Because Headcount is a default metric for Employee, the system generates an alert for Headcount to ensure its values remain consistent and expected. When new employee data is loaded, the Headcount metric can be viewed in the dashboard as a quick way to discern if the data is accurate.
Tags
Tags are user-defined categories that group content in the solution. A tag can apply to multiple object types, including analytic objects, metrics, and guidebooks. A user may filter for objects with a particular tag throughout the solution. For this setting, add tags to identify the object as part of a specific content category. For more information about tags, see Create and Assign Tags to Content.
Example:
The Compensation tag is used for the Pay Change Events metric, the Total Cost of Workforce concept, the Compensation Type dimension, and the Compensation Payout event. This tag therefore groups these objects together as relating to compensation. The Compensation tag itself is allocated to the Talent module, meaning it exists within that solution.
Subject settings
The subject settings allow you to modify its behavior and the events associated with the subject.
Events
Events represent an incident at a specific point in time that occurs to a subject. They have attributes, but an event does not change after it has occurred. For this setting, select the conception and termination events for the subject. These events define the validity interval for a subject. Some subjects do not require conception and termination events.
Example:
The Employee subject has the conception event Employee Start and the termination event Employee Exit. The conception event indicates that the employee has started with the organization and is active, while the termination event indicates the employee is no longer with the organization and isn't active.
Primary key dimension
The primary key dimension toggle determines whether or not the subject's primary key is dimensional. When enabled, the primary key is available in your solution as a group by. Enable this setting to allow the unique values for the subject to be grouped by and filtered in a visualization. This is used in conjunction with Captions to define a display name for the subject's primary key.
Example:
Understanding your organization's succession readiness can be vital to continued productivity when turnover occurs. To visualize succession candidates as a group by, enable the primary key dimension toggle for the Succession Candidate subject.
Event settings
The event settings allow you to modify its behavior and the subject associated with the event.
Subject
Subjects are entities, or separate and independent things, that evolve over time. They have attributes and changes to those attributes are captured over time. For this setting, select the subject that the event is associated with.
Example:
The event Pay Change Events is an occurrence of an employee's change in pay. For this event, the associated subject is Employee.
Termination event
A termination event is the event that ends the validity interval of a subject. For this setting, enabling the toggle indicates the event is a termination event and ends the validity interval of the associated subject member.
Overlay settings
The overlay settings allow you to modify its categorization and treatment of values.
Aggregation
There are two options for overlay aggregation: rollup and lookup. Each aggregation type works with both interval and period time models. The types define how the values aggregate in a hierarchy.
- Rollup: Non-leaf intersections in the overlay are derived from their descendants. Select rollup if the values can be aggregated.
- Lookup: Every intersection in the overlay has a value that is individually provided and retrieved. Select lookup if the values cannot be aggregated.
Example:
The Engagement overlay has “lookup” aggregation because individual records exist for every intersection in the overlay. Engagement data cannot be rolled up since the combined value is not a sum of the subgroups.
Contrastingly, the Revenue overlay is “rollup” aggregation because data is derived from descendants, depending on the data schema.
Overlay category
The overlay category defines the type of data for the overlay. For this setting, refer to the following overlay categories and their definitions to choose the one you need.
- Business outcome: Defines KPI data for historical or correlation analysis.
- Plan/budget: Defines future goals or plans.
- External benchmark: Defines known values that are externally collected, government-provided, or internally generated.
- Visier Benchmark: Defines aggregated data provided by Visier that is appended to the tenant data version.
- Other: No category is defined.
Support value property
The support value property is an optional setting for benchmark overlays. A support property must be defined in the overlay to use best-fit functionality with benchmark values. This works as a tie breaker if multiple slices have the same number of valid records. The best fit works best with base metrics on lookup overlays and is thus optional for rollup overlays.
An overlay with a support value property set will return the most specific population—that being the smallest value of the support value property. For this setting, select a benchmark property to be the support value property.
Time model
The time model defines how overlay values are handled. This setting primarily defines what values are shown when selecting multiple time periods in the solution. This depends on whether the overlay holds event values or subject values.
When selecting multiple time periods, one expects event values to be aggregate but only the latest subject value to be shown. The platform generalizes this split with two options for the time model. Use:
- Each value equals a period for event values.
- Each value equals an interval for subject values.
An overlay value equals a period when it represents an event, such as the Expenses overlay, which represents the aggregated values of expense events. These values are valid for an instance but the platform displays them for the period of the granularity of the overlay.
An overlay value equals an interval when it represents a subject, such as the Engagement overlay, which represents the aggregated values of engagement for the Employee subject. These values represent the state of a subject and is valid over an interval.