Reporting Content FAQ

We understand there are numerous aliases for what are either the same metrics or closely related metrics. What NocTel Insight provides are metrics by NocTel's definition.

It may be that your definition of a metric does not meet the same definition NocTel Insight implements that shares the same name. In this case, we recommend two remedies:

1. Export the report data to Excel (Crosstab) and rename the columns to your liking. If metrics need to be calculated differently this can be performed in Excel or a different in-house reporting platform for your organization.
2. Submit a custom reporting request to NocTel Insight Support. This is only recommended if the metric definition should be calculated differently than how it is calculated by standard NocTel measures. We do not recommend submitting a custom reporting request only to have the column names changed.

This is exactly the problem that Views solve! Views are associated with a user individually and multiple Views can be created for the same report. A View defines all the filter, parameter, and Zoom Level selections and remembers it. This means if you want to jump between different views of the same report without needing to manually change filters, etc. you can make a View for each relevant way you want to view the report.

Additionally, you can set a View to be the default way the report is displayed to you specifically.

NocTel Insight's tabular reports look a lot like Excel or spreadsheet applications present. However, NocTel Insight is smarter in that it wants to implicitly group data together - this is done based on the order of columns in a report. This relative implicit grouping is performed from left to right making the leftmost column the overarching super group meaning it should be the broadest column with the fewest unique values. For example, consider a report that has the following unique columns: ID, Hire Date, Departure Date, Salary, Person, and Department.

If you were to lay out a tabular report in NocTel Insight ordering these columns specifically in the order of Department, Salary, Person, ID, Hire Date, Departure Date then if you sorted on Salary, the sort would be performed relative to Department. Suppose we had the following data:

If you performed that sort descending by Salary you would end up with the following result:

Not the order you'd normally expect in Excel, but it occurred because NocTel Insight implicitly groups like values within columns and forms bucket subgroups. This means the salary sort was performed relative to each unique grouping of Department and did not agnostically look at the overall data in the set. Whereas Excel is happy to take any arbitrary column and sort everything relative just to that column, NocTel Insight does not have the same sort of looseness. This is much less of a problem in visual reports since plots like bars are actually an aggregation of something that's been visually bucketed. For example, revenues would be plotted in blue, operating expenses in orange, and profit margin in green. Sorting simply on "order all the values of the data set by revenue descending" is not a very useful action since it emphasizes just the revenue column and doesn't give a clear relationship to the other columns in the same row or at large.

If you were to take the following data and try to sort it in the same way, you would end up the exact same result:

Why? Because Department is our leftmost column that all the other columns are expected to be relative to (e.g.: Salary relative to Department) having unique values for each Department across all our rows means the subgroups NocTel Insight creates all consist of just one row. A bucket of a single row is already technically sorted.

If you require sorting on tabular data we recommend you perform an export to Excel (Crosstab) and perform the desired sorting there.

This is expected behavior. NocTel Insight will automatically change the orientation of labels relative to the web browser size and the monitor resolution. When there are many subtotal values and the web browser size is small, NocTel Insight may hide the smaller values to prevent cluttering the interface. In most cases, you can hover your cursor over such values (if they can be distinguished visibly) and a tooltip will display showing detailed information about the highlighted value.

This is expected behavior. NocTel Insight limits to 20 distinct colors on a legend to values, so when the legend is tied to a very large set of unique values that are tied to a legend color this results in colors being reused. The color assignment in legend to the value is done randomly.

While reusing colors for values on a legend are undesirable and can result in the same color being rendered for two different values next to one another, it is generally not a good practice to display a very large number of legend coded values. We recommend you filter down the data set - especially when looking at larger trends.

This is expected behavior. Since filtering and setting parameters can cause the explicit value range to vary wildly, using a linear scale on the Y-Axis can cause smaller values to be completely imperceptible on the report visualization. In most cases NocTel Insight uses logarithmic scaling of the Y-Axis so that the largest values in the data set are still very prominent, but the smaller values are not completely crowded out. On the Y-Axis this causes the tick mark scaling to not be consistent groupings like 1,000 → 2,000 → 3,000 and so on. You will likely see scaling like 0 → 10 → 100 → 1000 → 5000 → 10000 and so on.

NocTel Insight scales the Y-Axis in respect to the smallest and largest values in the resulting data set.

This is expected behavior. When plotting multiple metrics in the same view with their own dedicated chart, it often does not make sense to use a fixed uniform Y-Axis scale across them all. In the event one chart plots on a much larger scale than all the others (effectively being an outlier of the group), using a uniform scale all the other group member charts could become imperceptible. By having independent Y-Axes for each such chart, you can still interpret the same data patterns while being able to view each member well individually.

In the case of dual axis visualizations, the Y-Axis is synchronized between both plots expressed on the same plane. When one plot's Y-Axis values are considerably larger than the other's it will cause a "smooshing" effect of the lesser plot's values causing potentially dramatic rendering. This is normal and intentional as dual axis visualizations are intended to show the correlated relationship between two metrics that calculate different things but have a shared property (generally on the X-Axis, which is usually time interval). 

NULL values in some columns and filters are nothing to be worried about, though it's understandable to be concerned. Due to the use of multiple data sources in more reports, NocTel Insight uses a technique known as blending to take data from different origins and present it as a single unified data set. This is very similar at a larger scale to performing joins in SQL.

When blending occurs, rows that have values for some columns may not have a corresponding column to link with. When this happens there's only one half of the potential data that gets presented, so the missing half (or more) that couldn't be linked on is presented back as a NULL. Given this, you can think of such NULLs as being equivalent to "Not Applicable" or "Not Available".

It depends. For map-based visualizations NocTel Insight will not display any data points in which it cannot at a minimum determine a valid lat/long value or if the geocoordinate typed data does not result in a unique lat/long value. Attempting to map data points with incomplete data can result in grossly inaccurate attribution. For example, consider a data point that simply has "Portland, United States". Without a ZIP code or a state, there are multiple cities named Portland within the US this could be.

In visualizations that are not map-based, NULL values may be included though in many cases NULL values are reformatted or renamed in a more friendly manner such as "N/A".

Personalized Dashboards fall under the same conditions as custom reporting and carry the same terms. If a personalized or custom dashboard is implemented, it can be set for the specific user (or users) to be their default page that is loaded after successfully logging into NocTel Insight. See Custom Reporting for more info.

This can be setup if you are a licensed user. After logging in navigate to the content you wish to use as your default and open it. Once the report or dashboard has loaded, click your profile icon found in the upper right hand corner and then select Make This My Start Page.

If you wish to revert back to the Account default, this can be done anytime by clicking your account profile icon and selecting My Account Settings then selecting "Reset to Default" under the Start Page section.

NocTel Insight reporting data is not intended for billing purposes and does not reflect any applied charges or their effective rates that can vary by organization. This disclaimer is often stated in reports where operational data and analysis could be misconstrued for billing data.

Account and service billing data greatly differs from NocTel Insight's analysis of operational data in several important ways:

• Usage billing for NocTel Talk is performed per minute per call. For example, a call that is 2:31 in duration is billed as 3 minutes because that call was halfway through a third minute in duration.
• Direct type calls on NocTel Talk (extension to extension dials) are typically not billed. Records of direct calls are important from an operational standpoint, but generally do not have any presence when billing service usage. In an organization that does 80% of all calls as Direct extension dials, examining the overall minutes versus what was billed for minutes used would result in a highly lopsided calculation.
• NocTel Insight data can include deleted Extensions on the account to have a window into historical data. Billing only considers what's valid for the billing cycle.
• NocTel Insight reports generally allow great flexibility with date ranges - either explicit start/end dates or a relative range. This means using a strict range of 90 days or "This Month" in reports will generally cover multiple billing cycles or a partial billing cycle.