Developers use many productivity, coding, testing, and cloud-management tools as part of designing, developing, testing, deploying, and managing applications. Although most tools offer reporting and analysis capabilities, technology teams might have good reason to develop their own reporting capabilities to better analyze, predict, and manage aspects of their work.
Tableau is a popular and useful tool for delivering on those reporting needs.
Reasons to add a tool like Tableau to your portfolio might include:
- Analyzing, trending, predicting and reporting off more dimensions or aggregate metrics, or with different data visualizations than what out-of-the-box reporting your current tool provides.
- Cleansing data before reporting and analyzing.
- Integrating data from multiple tools to provide more comprehensive reporting.
- Centralizing reporting tools, standardizing data visualizations, and documenting data definitions to make it easier for technologists and their managers to use the analytics in decision making.
The good news is more technology tools today provide mechanisms to interface with the underlying data, and data-visualization tools and other analytics tools have methods to integrate different data sources and formats. Larger development organizations might find that the benefits of developing and maintaining analytics reporting capabilities outweigh the costs especially when using self-service business intelligence tools.
In this article are three examples of using Tableau to centralize dashboards and analytics from the tools used by technology organizations. While the examples were done using Tableau, they can be reproduced in other self-service BI tools that offer comparable integration options.
