Questions on Platform Analytics best practices

[kim-lindgren]

Hi all,

I have a couple of questions on PA best practices as my organization is going to try to define how to work with PA and what to avoid.

1. Creating breakdowns and breakdown sources. The suggestion here is that we do not allow the creation of several breakdown and breakdown sources for the same things in the global scope, e.g. Assignment group, because it creates too many different choices.

However, in the docs you can read:

Multiple breakdowns can use the same breakdown source. For example, instead of seeing ALL assignment groups for the Number of Open Changes indicator, you can limit the element list to just those groups that are part of the change process by configuring the Breakdown Source.

This formulation isn't clear - do they actually mean that the configuration should be done on the breakdown or on the breakdown source? If they mean the breakdown source, the problem is that dashboard filters cannot apply values from several breakdown sources at once, increasing the risk for conflicts. So we are leaning towards disallowing new breakdown sources in a scope completely, and instead recommending filters to be applied on the breakdown ("Default elements filter") or on the dashboard directly. The problem is that someone could still point to the docs and say "this is not a best practice".

2. PA indicators in data collection daily jobs should only be bundled together if they have the same indicator source - do you agree with this or not? I am pretty sure that this was brought up in a PA course I took and suggested as a best practice to limit the number of queries against the database. But now I can't find it, instead the docs simply says:

Data collection jobs query the database once for each indicator source. Thus, all indicators that use the same indicator source get data from the same point in time. 

Would you say that it is a best practice or not? Or would you recommend some other standard for grouping indicators together in a data collection job?

I understand that not all of this is set in stone, but I would love to hear some recommendations based on other people's experiences.

Regards,

Kim