GS Asset Usage Tracking Object - New field requests

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I love the addition of this object for horizon analytics. One thing that would make a massive improvement on it is the inclusion of some kind of Active boolean field.

 

Essentially, I have a few reports based on this object that look at stale assets. What I’m now running into is that when a report or dashboard is deleted, it’s record still persists. This is fine, but now they’re showing up on my stale asset list because no one has used them which is obvious as they have been deleted.

 

I can filter them out manually, but that gets really clunky, especially if I’m filtering on asset name on a report level, but have an asset name global filter on a dashboard - that could potentially get me undesired results.

 

If assets were marked as Active = false when they were deleted, it would be an easy filter add to reports where you only wanted to look at usage for active assets. This would also allow you to retain some historical data for deleted assets.

Hello @bradley, thank you for your post and feedback on the enhancement of Horizon Analytics, looping in our Product Manager to look into your request and get back to you.


Hey @bradley will attempt an inelegant solution as a stand in till we can add the column for status. ( ideally this is tracking for asset runs so may be that column might not make as much sense here ). 

To get the list of all asset types that were deleted - you can do that by adding a filter for event type contains delete. You can then use this in DD to transform the table with a case field and add a inactive column if the asset eve has a delete event associated to it. 

It’s not straight forward .. and we will work on closing the gap with this field added by default. 

 


Hey @bradley will attempt an inelegant solution as a stand in till we can add the column for status. ( ideally this is tracking for asset runs so may be that column might not make as much sense here ). 

To get the list of all asset types that were deleted - you can do that by adding a filter for event type contains delete. You can then use this in DD to transform the table with a case field and add a inactive column if the asset eve has a delete event associated to it. 

It’s not straight forward .. and we will work on closing the gap with this field added by default. 

 

Thanks for providing a work around, not sure I’ll go that route until something else is available unless I need to 🙂 I’m not sure I agree that a column doesn’t make sense - the use case is to easily filter out assets that are not in use, but the filter as at the asset level and not the event level. Maybe there’s a field called visibility that shows permission levels and availability, so you can filter out private assets, reports not consumed anywhere and deleted assets. 


@Azad  any update on if this will get added to the object anytime soon?  The workaround is not exactly ideal.


Related request but different fields to add to the request @Azad :

 

  • Asset Created Date: if you’re looking at poorly adopted assets then it is challenging to account for recencey bias against newly created reports, for example.
  • This one is more complicated and has more to do with permission reporting - but it would also be great to filter by permission bundle/group. Not everyone has access to the same assets and there is currently no way to account for that when using this object (that I can see). Even starting with a boolean Private = True/False would be useful so you can filter out private only reports and dashboards. 
    • I realize not all current and future assets will necessarily have a similar function, but some way to indicate if something is actually accessible to end-users and filter out things that are not would be great.

+1, I’d really rather not essentially reforge the existing (very useful) MDA to add a few fields that it sounds like you guys intend to add. An “Is Deleted” boolean would be excellent!


Is @Azad still around?

Or is someone else responsible for this now?  @anirbandutta do you happen to know?


@darkknight  - Yes, still around 🙂 .. 

I am Working with Preethi on a Admin home concept and we will be looking to prioritise these request soon. 


@anirbandutta is there any hope for this? Filtering out deleted assets without DD would be so handy.


Checking about this with the Product team.


Hi Bradley,

Just wanted to clarify if my understanding is correct. When you refer to an Asset, do you mean the Report or the Object? 

What I understand from the thread is that if there are no dependencies on an Object (Lookups, Reports, Rules, etc), you would want to update the Object with a value that says this object is not used and hence could be stale.

 

An update on Admin home is that we are working on a capability that would list out least run Assets to enable admins clean and maintain their Gainsight instance. 

This is Work in Progress, we do not have a release date fixed yet.

 

Thank you

Preethi


 

Just wanted to clarify if my understanding is correct. When you refer to an Asset, do you mean the Report or the Object? 

 

hey Preethi - when I’m referring to “asset” I’m talking about the items/records tracked within the object named “GS Asset Usage Tracking”: this could mean a report, dashboard, etc.

 

While I like the idea of including an out of the box report on least run Assets, we do essentially have that function today with the ability to make our own determination on when something is “stale” by creating custom reports. However, there is a lot of noise created by assets that have been deleted. The only real workaround is to use event Type = Deleted with Data Designer which is a very cumbersome solution for what should be a basic function of the reporting object.

It doesn’t do me much good to find an asset that hasn’t been used in months to try and track it down only to find it was already deleted.


@anirbandutta any update on this? Wanting to look at usage and not being able to do this easily without DD is a huge pain.