Astrato: Highlights from our 1st Monthly Spotlight

 

Our first Astrato Monthly Spotlight is done and dusted! Thanks to everybody who joined us to see our cloud BI and analytics platform live in action.

With data rapidly moving to the cloud, businesses need a workable analytics platform that resides in the cloud. Though it’s still common practice to extract data from the cloud to other software, such as Excel, to on-premise infrastructure, or to analytics software like Tableau, Power BI, and legacy software – this is not the best solution.

Why? Because moving data out of your data warehouse is BAD! When you extract or replicate data, you lose data governance, and the scalability and elasticity of the cloud.

In our Monthly Spotlight, our presenters Martin Mahler (CEO), Alexander Thor (Senior Product Manager), Piers Batchelor (Product Manager) and Martin Kierkegaard (Product Manager), demonstrate how Astrato is built for modern businesses moving to the cloud.

Here are a few highlights from the live event.

What is Astrato?

Astrato is a SQL-based analytics and dashboarding solution in the cloud that plays the data where it lives. With Astrato, data never leaves the source!

Getting started with Astrato

After the initial introduction, Martin Mahler ran the audience through how to get started using Astrato. Here are the quick and easy steps to get you hooked up:

1. Click on the Sign up now button on astrato.io
2. Choose how you want to sign up: via email, or via your Google or LinkedIn account.
3. Then, one click and you’re logged in to Astrato!
4. Once you’re in, you’ll see a few example Workbooks you can browse through for inspiration!
5. Next, connect up the data: Select the Demo Data connection to explore Astrato’s general functionality. Or connect to your Snowflake database, or Google Sheets.
6. Now you’re all set to play the data where it lives!

 

You can get more info on getting started with Astrato in our Help Center.

With everybody logged in and set up, Martin shared a few Astrato gems with the audience:

• Last-mile analysis: Astrato caters to last-mile analysis and enables you to make adjustments before creating your dashboard, such as changing field names or creating recurring metrics.
• Joins: Snowflake data is available in tables that you need to connect up, or create joins for. But many users may consider that too technical. And that’s where Astrato takes away the stress by making join suggestions. So no need for any SQL coding!
• Familiarity: You’ll find familiar function names, like Dimensions and Measures, as well as a layout and functionality that you’ll recognize.

After sharing those gems, the team began a deep dive into Astrato’s core components: Visualization, the Creator Experience, and Enterprise Authentication.

Visualization

Astrato offers best-in-class data visualization brought to you by the BI specialists at Vizlib.  A few new features the audience were shown included:

Filtering capabilities (Airbnb WB)

No-code, easy to use static filters on all objects such as Last Seven Days or Year to Date.

Filter object

With measures and images in the Filter, you can better understand the selected values before confirming your filters! So you don’t need to analyze values before selecting them. A great way to work faster AND smarter.

More table and chart customization

We’ve made sure the needs of dashboard creators are covered with extra customization options!

• Basic brushing and linking are now available in our Astrato charts!

• You can style your dashboard for light or dark mode!
• Highlight on-hover in tables.
• Automatic conditional formatting for table values.

Creator experience

Next up, the team demonstrated the new and improved creator experience, with users now able to access:

• Templates: Our predefined object templates should give you some inspiration and help you kickstart your dashboarding.
• Data refresh: Use the Refresh data function to leverage the power of live data!

Enterprise authentication

Sometimes social logins and username-password access control are not enough. Astrato lets you connect your company user store (a database storing user information) to Astrato, enabling you to automatically provision users and guard your analytics with your company login. Astrato provides secure access and is currently available for:

• Google Workspace
• OpenID
• Okta
• Azure Active Directory (Coming soon)
• Active Directory/LDAP (Coming soon)
• SAML (Coming soon)

Astrato Roadmap

The Astrato team also shared the all-important Roadmap. Here are a few things you can look forward to:

• Custom data in/out: Introducing more custom data for last-mile analysis.
• Data profiling: Getting more info on data before selecting it.
• Data lineage and control: Tracking the full lineage of your data.
• Visualization:
  • Filter Feedback Bar: Applied filters globally across the whole workbook and in-chart filtering.
  • Transitions: See how the data changes after filtering or as data is updated and refreshed!
  • Forecasting: One-click forecasting and automatic forecasting. No coding required, and all in a single click.
  • New visualizations and controls that you’ll recognise from most websites, such as a slider and date picker.
• Analytics creation:
  • Sheet layering management: A simple way to manage your objects and design your workbooks.
  • Embedding Astrato: The ability to embed individual sheets, objects, a group of objects or grids in any web app!
• Authentication roadmap:
  • Trigger workflows.
  • Automated deployment, such as a welcome email or a security alert notification.

And what does Astrato have in store in our longer-term Roadmap? Definitely writeback. Also, click-to-edit chart functionality and exploratory analytics. Much to look forward to!

If you’d like to learn more, visit our Help Center Astrato Roadmap page.

 

And lastly, here’s what one of our valuable audience members shared during the presentation:

The writeback capability partnered with layering objects opens the doors to infinite solutions and useability. It also puts Astrato in a league of its own as it would be baked in instead of a workaround solution (most other BI solutions). Example solutions: process automation, decision engines, workflow/data flow management, user-based data customization (ease of use).

Yogi Achilleos, Consultant, HY Analytics