We are at present utilizing IBM Analytics Engine and it works incredible. Following are the things that I like the most about this product is:- - Simple to Utilize - Reasonable Cost - With only a couple seconds you can ready to fabricate and convey groups - you can without much of a stretch break down information through different applications
Does great at open canvas editing and letting you fully customize without the need for a grid. It is democratizing self-service no-code analytics. You do not need to be a data or analytics engineer to get started, and you can go very far based on how intuitive and straightforward the UI is. Some of the biggest challenges with Looker Studio relate to user management/security, embedding options, and issue support. For a long time, every user needed to have a Gmail to invite them to view a dashboard via login, not sure if that has been improved yet. You can let any user view without logging in, but that is not always recommended due to security reasons. In terms of embedding, you can only iframe dashboards. More sophisticated BI tools let you embed elements via API or Javascript. Iframing dashboards also make drill downs and dashboard to dashboard navigation tricky/near impossible. There is also no ability to contact Google for support when bugs or outages happen. They point everyone to the Data Studio community. There is some ability to get in contact with Google if you have an enterprise-level contract with Google Cloud, but the path for support is very ad hoc and not always fruitful.
It is the simplest and least expensive way for us to automate our reporting at this time. I like the ability to customize literally everything about each report, and the ability to send out reports automatically in emails. The only issue we have been having recently is a technical glitch in the automatic email report. Sadly, there is almost no support for this tool from Google, but is also free, so that is important to take into consideration
It is not ideal and requires time and dedication to understand how to work with it. Also, it has a lot of limitations around data it can accept. But in most cases, this tool is sufficient for everyday tasks of product and marketing departments. I wouldn't say that the interface is very user-friendly, but for people who regularly work with analytical tools, it must be ok.
I give it a lower support rating because it seems like our Dev team hasn't gotten the support they need to set up our database to connect. Seems like we hit a roadblock and the project got put on pause for dev. That sucks for me because it is harder to get the dev team to focus on it if they don't get the help they need to set it up.
I have been using Azure for my previous analysis, I had a difficult time in understanding the Analytics engine rather IBM provided step by step tutorial for setup.
Also turning off a machine was not an option in Azure for some of the services so I had to pay for the service whether I use it or not
Looker Studio is far easier to implement, stand up, and learn. The interface is simpler and user-friendly for various levels of data visualization/analysis knowledge and experience. The biggest benefit of Looker Studio, however, is its ease of connection to GA data and speed. Furthermore, since it is an online program/tool, it requires less CPU/battery/storage on the user's device.
It has saved us quite a bit of time managing our catalog of clusters and keeping things organized.
Since we had a division we acquired running IBM Cloud, it was easy to get it running and try it out, but we found we prefer our Azure configuration better simply to keep our technology in alignment across corporate functions.
I definitely see some cost savings by separating out the storage and compute. It helps you start to put an appropriate price tag on certain instances of big data.
