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Comment by myowncrapulence | Hacker News Reader

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?

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.

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?

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 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.

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.

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 :-)

I think this is their visualization platform for BigQuery

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

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