Google Data Studio | Hacker News Reader

Google Data Studio

datastudio.google.com

572 pointswiradikusuma183 comments

For anyone wondering what this is:

"Google Data Studio (beta) turns your data into informative dashboards and reports that are easy to read, easy to share, and fully customizable. Start telling great stories with your data and make better business decisions.

Create up to five free custom reports with unlimited editing and sharing with Data Studio."

(From https://www.google.com/analytics/data-studio/)

This also isn't anything new, it was released a few months ago: https://analytics.googleblog.com/2016/05/announcing-data-stu...

So.. it's google analytics? Or a client for analytics? I still don't understand.

Why wouldn't this just be integrated into their existing platform?

My guess is that they are trying to make a data analytics platform for data in general, but the system integrates easily with their other data driven products.

The Data Studio appears to be explicitly a dashboard service, but for any kind of data (which puts it in competition with services like Tableau). There is some overlap with Google Analytics and its native dashboards, but that's not a bad thing.

Oh god the dashboards in GA are so awful, I cringe whenever someone requests one.

Why are they terrible? Do they misrepresent the information?

Somewhat like Tableau, but in the cloud.

(Tableau may have a cloud version too, I'm actually not sure)

...in the cloud, hence it aims more at being a glue for the web. Merge datasources from anywhere, create joint reports, an incentive for everyone to open-up their data and make it accessible to Google. Sounds like a smart idea to place Google in the middle of the web.

Yep, Tableau does have a cloud version too - both private and hosted.

Also worth checking out is http://redash.io for this kind of stuff - fairly new but developing quickly and very easy to hack on/add stuff. Good docs, easy to deploy and has some nice auto-update reports bits. We use that quite heavily. Its open source/free to use but also comes with paid cloudy plans.

Thanks for mentioning Redash! (I'm the author) It's actually not that new -- I've been working on it for 3 years now :-)

This just lets you make pretty dashboards/reports for google analytics and a bunch of other data.

I find it similar to PowerBI from Microsoft.

Except much, much, much less capable.

Agreed. PowerBI has so much more functionality - and more adding every month. And with the ability to use R to make charts, it has a lot more customizability.

Hopefully this the start of something very powerful.

I think this is their visualization platform for BigQuery

The Google Analytics team built a dashboard tool, as part of their "Google Analytics 360" release. Other teams, including Cloud, then worked with them to make it available for other data sources, including Google BigQuery and MySQL.

This is a fully-fledged basic business intelligence tool, which can chart data from Google Analytics, Google Sheets and MySQL an series of other sources. It is a perfect free alternative to QlikView/Tableau for some simple data projects.

So it's a reporting tool? All the link does is take me to the google sign in page.

Here's a non account-locked page: https://archive.fo/vkplk

Thanks. First big issue for me, it's US only. Why on earth does something like this need to be region locked?

Second is that it's hosted. That makes it a non-starter for enterprise reporting.

Probably no reason other than that it takes time and resources to go through all the steps necessary to launch in a region (e.g. localization, legal etc), and it's more effective to get feedback on a beta product early in one region than to delay for many.

EU data protection can be in play ATM since they might not have this thing complaint, same goes for other regulations.

So the easy thing is to limit it to the US.

Compliant, as in complying with regulations?

Exactly. Because we in the EU do not want our customer data (be it personal identifiable information or not) to be transferred to the US without consent of our customers. And rightly so.

I am abbreviating massively here, but since the "Safe Harbor" things are actually a little bit more rough around data transfers.

Non the less Data Studio is available in Germany, as I have already used it. I might be limited on the data sources though.

Working OK in the UK.

Working in Brazil.

I'm in Europe and it works just fine.

not working from Belgium: "Data Studio is not available in your country."

Works in Austria and Germany, though.

Interesting point: what if you work for someone in the US and want to collaborate on a report?

Or you work in the US but need to access / change a report while visiting a client in a country where it's not enabled...

Pretty lame.

I didn't try it, just read the page:

>Data Studio is currently available to users in the United States and we’ll be rolling it out to other geographic regions throughout the year. We hope it helps you share more data and make better business decisions.

FWIW it works in the Netherlands.

Not working in Ireland.

Works in Canada

I'm sure this is awesome. However if I were a f500 company using this (or in competition with one), I would be careful with what data I put into Google's cloud.

Why? Has Google ever done anything with their cloud services that cause you to distrust them?

Generally, the products Google offers for free involve them using the data you put into it to tailor their products and services to you. Not having examined the EULA, I don't know if this product is similar, but in general, that is the reason my legal department does not react nicely when projects try to bring google products into our ecosystem.

Not the PP, but though I have never come across anything substantive, there have been persistent rumors that Google M&A (and other) folks trawl through GMail to gain competitive advantages and negotiating leverage, particularly vs. startups.

OTOH, the rumors are most often of the "my 2nd cousin's mother-in-law's half-brother's secretary's boyfriend's ex-husband" variety, ie. not even anonymous 1st hand claims.

Anecdotally, these rumors seem to most often be spread by Enterprise SaaS salespeople.

I feel those rumors are just incorrect from my previous experience working in Google.

Not just wrong but practically impossible.

Why impossible? Isn't mass data mining already in place for gmail in order to provide targeted ads?

Wouldn't this be the opposite of mass data mining?

"Which startups are good acquisition targets?" is very much a data-mining problem, though I would expect that noticing a startup experiencing "hockey stick" growth based on the growth of their Google Cloud Platform bill (or perhaps the # of users logging in with Google credentials, etc.) is much more likely than any Google employees (no matter how highly placed) trawling through Gmail looking for proprietary information.

Because Google's production systems aren't internally open like that, other teams can't just go grepping through production data systems (which is encrypted at rest anyway). Yes, there are obviously systems which do index data for search, spam prevention, etc, but those are guarded too, and the surface area of access is greatly reduced.

You can't just decide "Hey, I've got an idea for a cool 20% project, I'm going to try crawling all mail and looking for stock market tips". There is defense in depth, in terms of technical walls, as well as people walls, that makes something like that very unlikely. With tens of thousands of employees, it would be easy to get 1 rogue employee who could do serious damage with that kind of access.

Google takes data security and privacy very very seriously, and a breach of that magnitude would threaten hundreds of billions in valuation for a rather crazy risky idea for an M&A department?

Great, thanks for the taking the time to reply.

BTW, Google Ventures has a better way to do this which relies on public data, Project Sandhill.

By looking at data from Crunchbase, Angelist, etc you can get a deeper graph of the interrelationships in Silicon Valley. If I was looking at who to invest in, or M&A, I'd be looking at data like that, as well as talking with investors and people they've worked with.

You are almost certainly right, but it is worth noting the considerable amount of FUD spread by interested parties that feeds into these sort of rumors.

OTOH, "The NSA has a backdoor into Google" used to be something only paranoids believed too...

Yes, open them up to the NSA (and therefore other three letter agencies as well)

Given how many companies use Google Apps for Business, I think it's clear that they already trust Google with their data.

This is almost my favorite tool, barring a couple problems. Its very easy to use, and makes very readable, pretty reports/dashboards. Sharing via a URL is nice, but I really like just exporting as a PDF and emailing them. Here is an example report that took <10 minutes to make [1]. The big problems though:

1. Beta version. You can't use this in production, send reports to clients, etc. when this tool is in beta. A client gets this report and expects all future reports to be this pretty, but Google might just kill it off or it could break.

2. Limited to 5 reports. The majority of agencies/brands can't afford the $100k+ a year for premium G suite. 5 reports per account kind of sucks, and I've had to use old google accounts to get past that limit.

3. Design. Most people simple aren't good at design, so you need a designer to create a good number of templates. Users cannot stray away from templates unless they know what they are doing. While its easy to use, its easy to make things look bad too.

4. You can pull from a Google Sheets, but updating that sheets doesn't play nicely with data studio.

Side ux notes.. changing pages resets the date range which is annoying. Choosing custom colors for some charts doesn't always work.

[1] http://i.imgur.com/1SCUNu1.jpg

Have you seen Power BI?

Re: #2, I don't think Data Studio is a part of GSuite, or at least it doesn't appear to be.

It isn't. It's part of the Analytics 360 Suite. Other products in the suite being: Google Analytics, Google Optimize, Google Surveys, Audience Center, Google Attribution and Google Tag Manager. It's a very similar set of products to the Adobe Marketing Cloud.

How does updating sheets used as data source not play nicely with dat studio? I would expect the report to update when the sheet changes, at least when the report is reloaded. Is this what is happening?

Right now, because of caching the update can take up to 12h. But you can manually update the data source to bring the latests data from the spreadsheet.

Thanks for the heads-up. That would indeed cause an interesting confusion if not known to the users. We could probably live with it for some use cases, a more direct update would be better though.

With web tech you can make interactive graphics and animations, sure you can hover over a diagram and see the numbers, but they are only scratching the surface of what is possible.

Just curious, how did you grab that "Dark Social" traffic from GA? A custom/advanced segment?

I've already sold this to two clients. Can't see it going anywhere. But I've been wrong before...

Tried using it yesterday, but says it's not available in my country (South Africa). I'm tired of silly restrictions like this, it immediately turned me off Data Studio.

I have a Tableau licence at work, which we feel are expensive and restrictive in terms of transferring licenses around when no longer needed.

Seems like a no disappointment option these days is to just invest in the d3 ecosystem as much as possible.

It could be as simple as them testing the waters or as complex as data storage and analysis having different requirements per country. It is annoying but may be the best they can do.

I could access it from US VPN, so I don't know what the real trouble is. I can't think of anything in my country that would prevent Google from offering this service. From a billing perspective, Google already makes some money from me, and many companies, so I can't imagine that being a stumbling block.

But a company the size of Google can't just assume that there won't be anything wrong with operating in another country.

They need to spend time and money on lawyers which specialize in that country's laws to look over everything and make sure.

And that takes time and money, and you don't want to spend either of those when testing the waters on a new product.

Google could have spread the Beta using an invitation-only scheme (Remember Gmail? That's how they controlled the load). Exclusive invitations are more inclusive than a US-centric approach. Customers get fed-up with US-centric approaches, which give us:

- Different content on Netflix (Many movies in US, less than 1/4 in Poland),

- Different treatment as civilians (See: NSA spying, Predators)

- Movies coming 6 months later in Europe.

I get it that US customers have more money, but if companies could use a specific criteria like "high-return customers" rather than a prejudice like "Only Silicon Valley customers will understand", that would be nice.

But if we assume the issue is a legal one and they need lawyers specializing in each country's laws to vet it for every country they release it in releasing a preview per-country makes sense.

You should check out cheaper alternatives http://www.infocaptor.com

Before you build anything from scratch in d3, check this http://www.infocaptor.com/dashboard/charting-engines-vs-anal...

It's getting too common for new tools from large companies (Google, Facebook, Twitter, Apple) to be unavailable in most smaller markets. For example, Data studio told me that "Data Studio is not available in your country.". Yet, I can play with pre-existing reports.

Drives me wild also. I assume it's because i18n / l10n takes time / money so it's easier to start with English speakers only, rather than something about controlling access to intellectual property or some form of digital colonialism.

Where iPhone / Android app stores are concerned, I can understand a bit with not launching an app in a country until it's really ready to go, otherwise you just attract negative reviews.

But in this case I can't see a good reason for not allowing an English-only version in all countries.

> Where iPhone / Android app stores are concerned, I can understand a bit with not launching an app in a country until it's really ready to go, otherwise you just attract negative reviews.

As a side note, as the stores are purely virtual, it becomes very easy to use a store outside of the country you live in. For instance I kept using the same store after moving country, or I know people using the US stores for various reasons while staying outside of the US.

I am actually wondering how niche of case this could be, but this makes weird cases where you're bound to switch back and forth between multiple stores just to get a single app that didn't want to get published in all the countries.

In particular bank apps do that a lot, when they're already checking for account numbers etc. so they could as well publish in every country and still only allow their members to use the app.

I don’t expect them to localize for my language (the country is mostly not relevant to l10n). By all means, English only. Perfectly understandable if an advanced feature that depends on a language (Siri) is not available (this one actually is). Or if it truly is country-specific (Siri’s restaurant reservations, traffic, public transport, ...), again, understandable.

But why is Data Studio not available worldwide in English? Makes no sense.

Or why is freakin Wikipedia search geo-blocked in iOS and macOS and you only get Wikipedia results or suggestions in Safari in select few countries and not anywhere else, even with English version? That my phone shuts of half its locale-indendent features the moment I cross the border from Germany makes no damn sense.

We're using this a lot at Khan Academy already. Nothing that other products can't do, but the ease of use, familiar interface, and google account integration have made use of it spread through the company very quickly

That's awesome. May I ask what tool Data Studio replaced for you?

"Data Studio is not available in your country."

Why is this still a thing any more? Even more this is a product of a single company so no legacy licensing scheme (like for movies for instance) can be blamed :(

I'm in Portugal and can see it just fine. Where are you accessing from?

Belay that, I just tried to create a report and yes, it says the same to me. No clue if it's a matter of data sovereignty, privacy, legal, technical, or billing, and the usual non-information from Google.

Did you try to create a new Rport? I am in Austria and it's telling me that it is not available in my region.

I am in Germany, using data from a Google 360 Account (former GA Premium) and it is just doing fine.

It gives the same message in Norway as well. Maybe these countries have stricter privacy laws or something like that?

No problem from Germany. Maybe because my analytics and user account was created in the US.

I'm in Portugal too and it doesn't work, only let's you play around with the pre-existing reports. Edit: commented before seeing your second reply, my bad.

Brazil, can create new reports.

MySQL support exists,but no postgres?

I notice that Google has consistently built support for MySQL in all its products...but never postgres.

I don't understand why - is there a massive amount of engineering involved ?

Why you'd use MySQL rather than PostgreSQL in 2016 baffles me unless you're supporting a legacy application, I feel your pain.

One interesting case with Uber: https://eng.uber.com/mysql-migration/

Most of us aren't doing millions of writes per second though.

An extreme edge case is not a counterargument.

That's not that interesting to most of us. That's a huge edge case that I've seen used as fodder in every MySQL vs Postgres argument on HN since it's come up since that blog article was published.

That shows MySQL can be used as a base for building your own key-value store on. It doesn't say anything about it being reasonable (or even good) relational database.

I'd argue that the majority of people are supporting legacy rather than building something new, or something that has been built in the past couple years.

New? Postgres has been around for 20 years.

Actually longer than that. It effectively is what Ingres was a long time ago before Oracle basically killed them off. I believe Ingres was a product of some IBM people? Way way ahead of its time.

As someone who has used MySQL with absolutely no problems on over 100 projects over the past 20 years, I really don't get the hate I see for it on HN and other places. I've never used Postgres so cannot comment on that, but unless someone can show me that MySQL kills kittens with every query and Postgres moves us one step closer to a cure for cancer with every SELECT, then I'm just going to carry on over here in my corner...

> unless someone can show me

Why no. If you do not get why PostgreSQL is so much better than MySQL after reading so many people telling you otherwise, I guess I will not spend time on this task. There are some people prefering PHP over Python or Golang, too.

Just a hint: if you did not try PostgreSQL, just maybe give it a try?

And yes, MySQL kills kittens (i.e. potentially silently truncates data) at every UPDATE it receives.

> I guess I will not spend time on this task.

Then why do you comment at all? Your post brings nothing to the discussion but appeals to popularity and shaming gp.

Well, I'll give you credit for going that little bit further than the post I was responding to. At least you gave a hint as to ONE issue that MySQL can have (which, by the way, I have never come across in the millions or so UPDATES that my projects have done over the years). A link to a discussion about the problem would have been handy, but, oh well.

And I actually did try PostgreSQL once or twice many years ago. If I remember correctly, it was for a project that required full text search capability, and I had no end of trouble trying to configure and optimise PostgreSQL to do it back then, and simply reverted back to MySQL which worked out of the box. Or possibly I even went to SQLite with FTS3 back then to get it to work. I, like most developers would rather be creative on my code rather than fight my tools.

I have several websites with a reasonable number of users running on both MySQL and Postgres. On the balance I think I prefer MySQL - I find the replication in MySQL quite a lot simpler and the issues are not that big of a deal, and well known. Although I will say that both databases are fixing their faults as time goes on. For example Postgres is getting easier to configure replication and as of MySQL 5.7 the silent truncate default STRICT_TRANS_TABLES/STRICT_ALL_TABLES is fixed (although generally implementations I've used set SQL_MODE='STRICT_ALL_TABLES' by default, so it hasn't been an issue).

Google is a MySQL shop. It's what their RDS-like cloud offering runs, and it is (or at least, was) the supported RDBMS for building apps internally. (Sadly)

Shameless plug : We have been building http://www.reportdash.com with a similar target market. Datastudio appeared to be our startup killer in the beginning. But I guess, we may narrowly escape owing to the usability advantage, and the deep integration we have for datasources like adwords, fb ads etc

We are working hard to give a fight. We are about to release a major update in the coming months which makes slicing and dicing data a breeze.

Having signed up for a trial the major downfall from your on-boarding process is that there is no test data for me to have a play with.

I want to give you guys a chance but my initial evaluation needs to be with some dummy data tailored to your features so you can showcase these.

Yup. Truly understand that. Shall mail you a demo account. We are still work in progress, and many touch points are not the way we really wanted. A demo account is up there in our priority list.

Demo accounts are OK, but what you really want to do is avoid the empty account syndrome after signup altogether. The user is all excited to check out your product, but is intimidated by the blank slate state.

Instead, the first thing the user should see is a fully functioning realistic example of your value prop, and it is critical that they can edit and mess with it to their hearts content before they start a new project of their own. Designing for the blank slate is a quite well known design pattern in mobile UX, but I can tell you from experience it works wonders for SaaS conversion as well (check profile if interested in an example).

Fully agree. I started working on it!

An alternate from Microsoft is Power Bi. Much more mature. https://www.powerbi.com

It's also Windows-only.

Not the cloud version. To be honest though what business isn't using Windows?

Many SOHOs, some SMBs and Google. Enterprises do run Windows, but then, since when they were known for being bleeding edge?

Have you heard Office365?

Yes, I've heard about it. And you would be surprised, how often the answer to putting your company data on other's people computers is: No.

good thing it's the same here for Google data studio...

powerBI cloud has a free tier and does not require a subscription to try afaik: https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/

in either case, you can work with spreadsheets stored on your computer, but in any case just like Google, you'd have to upload it to work with it.

the pro version doesn't tie you to O365 either even though it uses the same platform

We use this for a client with Google adwords data. User can go to a url and see data and plots we selected for him. Decent tool, easy to use but a bit slow when I used it last month.

I used to sync Google analytics and other external data source to Google Spreadsheet with addons(https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/google-analytics/f...) and visualize the data

Just played around datastudio, customization seems easier.

Wonder how related this is to Fusion Tables

https://fusiontables.google.com/

Data Studio is much more focused on creating data analytics dashboards. It looks like a very visual centric tool. Thanks for the link to fusion though. I haven't heard of it. Kinda out of the googlsphere.

I've been staring at the MySQL connection settings deciding if I want to actually want to connect this with or not for about five minutes.

Its surprising and disappointing that as a Google product you have to contact a sales rep for pricing.

For a company like Google, who is known to make contact with actual support people difficult, making pricing of all things a sales interaction is off-putting.

For me I continue to be somewhat excited when I see Google has an actual human interacting with a customer/user even if it is in a sales role.

Pricing is around $15/user. 200 users minimum. Yeah, your read that right.

Did you find that on the Data Studio site? If so, share the link?

We (at D4) have been offering something similar - QueryTree lets users connect a data source (MySQL, MS SQL, AWS or PostgreSQL) and then build powerful reports and visualisations with no technical knowledge required. We even suggest JOINs that make sense automatically. http://querytreeapp.com/

I'd be really interested in feedback from people who like/dislike the Google Data Studio product.

This is nice, from the looks of it you can query datasources in the Google Cloud ecosystem like BigQuery etc, although it doesn't appear to support joining across datasources (could be wrong)

This would probably be very useful for 'ad-hoc' queries/reports. I don't believe AWS offers anything similar right now, outside of spinning up an EMR cluster and attaching a notebook or something - but that's a lot of setup

>I don't believe AWS offers anything similar right now

I guess Amazon QuickSight [1] is similar to Google Data Studio.

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/quicksight/

Data Studio is not available in your country.

Would you like to be notified when the service is available?

Sigh...

Let's get straight to the point.

How does it compare against ChartIO (SaaS)? https://vimeo.com/149352971

And how does it compare against Looker (self hosted)? https://techcrunch.com/2016/01/14/looker-analytics-platform-...

By the way. Those two are the main players if you want state of the art data visualization ;)

I think tools like this are going to enable more government accountability. Facilitating visualization and sharing of what otherwise would be a bunch of numbers is key.

In Mexico there is only one electric utility company. The price per kWh is supposed to be a function of the median monthly temperature. However, many cities are misclassified on purpose. A map showing which cities are misclassified would be really easy to do and share if it supported maps.

Hey, this sounds interesting. Are you up to do this? I'd like to help.

Shoot me an email to pablo (at) rocketjourney.com to discuss it further!

I'm gathering the data from the official sites, so I'll probably send it tomorrow.

A nicer alternative for non-US folks, or even those in the US, would be DataHero (https://datahero.com/). Less feature rich than Tableau, but also extremely easy to use with practical graphs and data mashups out of the box.

I have no connection to the app, other than I've tried dozens like it, including Google's Data Studio.

We use Klipfolio. Very nice, many chart types with many many more connectors.

I always see this as a bullet point discounting other more advanced tools. How many chart types exactly do you need? As far as I can tell, most analyses that anyone needs to do on tabular data (so ignoring graph like analytics) requires maybe 6 different chart types (bar charts, line charts, scatter plots, heatmaps). Those cover basically every possible combination of numeric and categorical data axes (including color and size of elements).

I invite you all to visit and test Viur (https://www.viurdata.com) to build your reporting. We offer unlimited connections to the most commonly used database engines and also google analytics. You can build your dashboards using drag & drop or write SQL. Disclaimer: I am one of the co-founders.

Looks really nice, often having business wide dashboard are a pain and it's nice for everyone to be able to see sign ups etc. MySQL data source is good but I'm hoping they'll include things like prometheus or others later. For now this would work with some Segment.io or similar batch jobs

I wonder if this will be able to extend the Google cloud console / analytics.

And it's nit-picky but some of the dashboards aren't responsive in chrome, which I would normally let go but if you're gonna force us into the cult of material design you might as well get that right.

Is there any information on building connectors to new data sources? I can't find any on the site.

A site we've been working on for a while that does something similar, but with d3.js and dc.js to bring the charts to life: https://www.sizzleanalytics.com

When are you offering a paid version? Love your tool but really want to have an embed function

Why waste any time using it if a few years down the line they will discontinue it?

Feels old seeing this on every single thread about a Google product. This isn't something you need to retool your company around and end up screwed if it's canceled. It's a nice analytics dashboard that either provides value for you for however long you decide to use it, or if it has no value to you then you just won't use it.

Perhaps Google should work on their poor reputation then.

It's less about their reputation and has just become a meme nowadays, particularly among techies who were the few adopters of things like Wave. I don't think Google misses on and shuts down a larger percentage of things than any other company, just seems like with everything they have going on, they try more things and inherently fail on more things. It obviously sucks for the users of those things, but I'd rather the time is spent innovating and trying many different things than spending valuable engineering time supporting projects that aren't going anywhere.

When you fail frequently at things, this fail often strategy, you aren't valuing your customers. Saying they have an excuse for failing often doesn't change the effect it has on users. Which is that they can not place their trust in your products or your company, because you've made it clear you're willing to shut them down at any time.

I definitely agree that it sucks when you're one of the consumers affected. But I would argue that this fail often strategy lets you quickly figure out what works and what doesn't for most consumers, and let's you prioritize accordingly and maximize net consumer value created. Obviously that comes with negatives, but I believe they are outweighed by the positives.

Push come to shove, I'd side with Thiel. That is many of Google's fails are staged. They need excuses / distractions from their core monopoly-esque products.

> but I'd rather the time is spent innovating and trying many different things than spending valuable engineering time supporting projects that aren't going anywhere

Instead, they have some of their engineers do things like remove the ability to do custom grouping on youtube subscriptions. It often seems like they are seeing how badly they can treat their users and still remain the leader.

I've never even heard of that, and I would consider myself a heavy youtube user.

But i'm just one person, so that doesn't mean much, but do you really think they are just removing features to spite you?

What about the fact that every feature has a cost, and by removing it they remove that cost. How did that custom grouping work on mobile? on TV's? on youtube gaming? If it's not supported everywhere, it feels buggy and incomplete, which is bad not only for their image, but also for usability. What was it's discoverability? How important of a feature was it really to you?

It's easy to use these things as examples of "something they took away", but i'm confident that if I were put in their exact same situation, I would most likely make the same choice, and i'm sure i'm not alone here.

Maybe you are a recent user like myself as the functionality was removed relatively recently, people have come up with various crap workarounds.

> do you really think they are just removing features to spite you?

Of course not, just curious why they are removing useful functionality. Your questions are valid, but considering Google's history of "improving" their products, I don't feel compelled to believe there is a good reason for it.

That might be true. But it's the expectation that they don't have to be so quick to do it, especially when they are so good at mucking up launch and growth. The best example being Wave. Meanwhile Slack, an inferior effort, is laughing.

Google has a reputation for being a booty call. Fun and crazy, which is great in college. But if you're looking for a LTR a newish Google product probably is marry + kids material.

ugh, BI has one of the strongest lock-ins known to man.

I'd say this was true a while back because of database lock-in, but most new BI tools have a variety of connectors. I'm working with a non profit right now to migrate dashboards off of Salesforce, for example.

Yes. But why even bother if the company offering the product is known to abandon its customers? Why not find and trust a trustable brand? Unless there's something exceptional about this product. First time shame on you. Second, third and fourth time... shame on me.

Every company sunsets old products. Do you feel the same when Windows discontinued XP? When apple dropped support for safari on windows? When your favorite startup tool just closed up shop one day without much of any notice?

At least when google sunsets a tool, they almost always give a year+ of notice, the often provide alternatives, the always allow full data export, and they have been known to extend support for a product if there is a lot of pushback.

I find it odd that valid criticism such as the parent is getting downvoted for no apparent reason. HN used to be about providing a balanced view on subjects, not about censoring negative opinions.

Because it serves a useful purpose today.

If it gets more people using bigquery and the rest of their platform they'll keep it around. Plus, Amazon have a similar product, so this is in a completely different league to Reader or whatever.

Their colors are off in the AdWords example dashboard. The donut charts in the bottom right, yellow is mobile phones in the chart, but the mobile phone icon is blue. The other chart-icon colors are similarly off.

No drill-down, only explore the time axis. Worthless for any real BI

It's not for 'drill-down', it's for dashboards and data viz.

Anybody have decent test data connections that can be used to play with this? Unfortunately my personal Google account is sparse and doesn't provide much meat on the bone.

Has anyone gotten YouTube Analytics to work? My authorization did nothing, and sadly that's what I'd like to generate!

Edit: Nevermind, I left the page, came back and things worked(?)

I've been using silk.co for a while now. It seems quite similar in it's use case... I wonder if anyone might be able to comment on the differences?

Just curious, are any people in this thread already using Eclipse BIRT, Jasper Reports or Pentaho? Would you mind sharing your experiences/use-cases?

Can definitely see this becoming useful as a potential metabase replacement since we are using mysql - lack of postgres support is a weird choice though

What do you think, Companies having terabytes of data may use these GA as a main tool for their analytics ?

Upto what extent they may rely on these tools?

The functionality is pretty limited... For a score card widget, it seems to only aggregate values, what about min/max/avg ??

You might want to change the aggregation type of a metric. You can also duplicate a metric on the data source and give it a different aggregation type.

From: https://support.google.com/360suite/datastudio/answer/640204...

My guess is that this was some internal tool that got cleaned up and opened to the public as a beta.

Looks like they need some qa. The sample Adwords report looks really buggy on the iPad Pro (chrome)

works on top of BigQuery!

Someone please spoil my optimism about this. This seems like a game changer in reporting. What do you guys use that make this obsolete?

Software and API's that will exist in 2 years :(

Requires google analytics premium which is effectively enterprise only ($100k+/yr), which I'm sad about.

I have tried it ~1 month ago and was quite a bit underwhelmed - direct connectivity with Google products is nice, but the data manipulation capabilities themselves lag behind Tableau a big deal (especially when it comes to clicking around in charts and tables to slice your dataset, which is admittedly something in which Tableau excels).

I do believe it is a valuable addition to the GA enterprise tier (especially for customers savvy enough to use BigQuery too), but at the moment I don't quite see it as a serious competitor to other off-the-shelf BI tools - would be very happy to be proved wrong in a few months, though.

Have a look at Power BI: https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/

And that is less than 2 years after they abandoned Google refine.

It was openSourced as OpenRefine. https://github.com/OpenRefine/OpenRefine

Does this make chart.io obsolete?

I think what will make chart.io obsolete more that this announcement is their (chart.io's) reluctance to put any sort of pricing plans or free tier capabilities (or even if they actually have a free tier) anywhere on their site. I get that this is the enterprise-y thing to do, but it would be a massive turn off for the sort of audience who would be evaluating it against DataStudio or PowerBI etc.

Chartio seems to be targeting OEMs.

ChartIO (cloud) used to be $99/month for startup, then $499 later (after they increased the pricing). Not sure what it is now.

By comparison. Last I talked to Looker (self hosted). They asked for $65k/year.

Looks pretty complex. I wonder how long it took them to pull it off.

Is this beta for US-based hosts only at the moment?

Google Analytics 2.0

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