Aggregate Sources are the recommended method for incorporating data from tables outside the primary application scope. They provide a performant and maintainable bridge, allowing you to define the necessary fields and calculations without creating direct dependencies or less efficient custom scripted sources. Creating a direct Data Source on a custom table in another scope is not a standard practice and can lead to maintenance issues.

Performance Analytics indicators can be configured with specific schedules (like Business Hours) that exclude non-working time from calculations. A standard report querying the underlying table would typically include all elapsed time, including weekends and nights, leading to a higher average. This is a common and important distinction when configuring service-oriented metrics.

When a breakdown is applied, records where the dimension field is empty (null) are not represented in the breakdown slices. These records are still counted in the main indicator’s total. This is a frequent source of confusion. The solution often involves ensuring data completeness or creating an ‘Unassigned’ or ‘N/A’ category through data source or indicator configuration.

Holt-Winters Exponential Smoothing is specifically designed for forecasting data with trends and seasonality. It uses weighted averages of past observations, giving more importance to recent data, and has components to model level, trend, and seasonal patterns—making it ideal for quarterly forecasts with known seasonal variations like those in fall.

The standard PA scorecard hierarchy is: Strategic Objective -> Critical Success Factor (CSF) -> Key Performance Indicator (KPI) -> Indicator. CSFs are the key areas that must succeed for the objective to be met. KPIs are the measurable metrics that prove the CSF is being achieved. Therefore, you define the causal link: Improved CSAT (KPI) proves Effective Issue Resolution (CSF), which drives Improved Customer Satisfaction (Objective).

A Bullet Graph is a compact, bar-based visualization designed to compare a primary measure (like current backlog) against one or more qualitative ranges (e.g., Poor, Fair, Good) and a target marker. It is ideal for threshold-based monitoring, as you can configure the ranges to represent your dynamic thresholds (e.g., based on a 4-week average), providing immediate visual context for performance.

The best practice is to push complex logic as close to the data source as possible. Creating a derived field in the Aggregate Source allows you to define a business rule (e.g., FCR = true if state is resolved AND the assignment group never changed). This ensures the calculation is performed once during data collection, is consistent for all indicators using this source, and is more performant than scripted calculations at the indicator level.

A high monthly average availability can hide the impact of a short, severe outage. A single 4-hour outage in a 720-hour month still results in ~99.44% availability, which may appear acceptable. This exposes the limitation that averages measure central tendency but not variance or severity. A companion indicator tracking the count or duration of major outages provides crucial context about stability and business impact.

Dashboard Parameters are user-configurable variables that can be exposed in the dashboard header. You can configure a widget’s breakdown dimension to reference a parameter. This allows an end-user (with appropriate permissions) to select a different field (like Category or Priority) from a dropdown list, dynamically changing the breakdown for that widget without any code or configuration changes.

Aggregate Sources are the recommended method for incorporating data from tables outside the primary application scope. They provide a performant and maintainable bridge, allowing you to define the necessary fields and calculations without creating direct dependencies or less efficient custom scripted sources. Creating a direct Data Source on a custom table in another scope is not a standard practice and can lead to maintenance issues.0