Altair® Panopticon™ Real Time 2022.1: An Introduction
Altair EmployeePanopticon 2022.1 is now available to all licensed users, and we recommend that all customer organizations plan their upgrades now. This update applies to Panopticon Real-Time and Panopticon Streams.
This video provides a quick overview of the updates and changes in this new release:
2022.1 is a major release with numerous improvements to the software’s data-handling and analytics capabilities:
Server Administration
- Administrators now have the option to block Designer users from accessing global parameters that are set at the server root level, for example containing database access credentials. The administrator can optionally set other values for any parameters, at an intermediate level between the root and the Designer users’ personal folders, which prevents the Designer users from accessing the root level values. (DDTV-16411)
- We have improved the layout of the server management area. For Designers and Administrators, server content is now organized into “My Organization” and “My Workspace”.
- You can now export and import scheduled tasks through the server administrator GUI, which greatly facilitates migration of scheduled tasks from one server to another (DDTV-17370)
These changes improve security and reduce the chances of inexperienced Designer users from creating problems for other analysts and dashboard designers. The layout changes support a more intuitive user experience. The ability of administrators to import and export tasks makes expanding utilization within large organizations much easier.
User Experience
- We have added a new onboarding tour with helpful information appearing in onscreen panels. (DDTV-18426)
- We have streamlined the creation of new data tables and making connections to data sources with a new step-by-step guided wizard which keeps unrequired settings options out of the picture until the user chooses to perform more advanced data table editing (DDTV-18282)
These changes shorten the learning curve substantially for new users.
Analytics
- Free text filters now support three modes of automatic wildcard filtering: substring (filter matches on anything that contains), prefix (filter matches on anything that begins), or none (filter matches exactly). (DDTV-18508 and DDTV-18557)
- When combining data from two or more different data sources, release 2022.1 adds the ability to do Full Outer Joins or Cross Joins, in addition to the previously available Left Outer, Right Outer, and Inner joins (DDTV-17616)
- Dashboard designers can now configure map plots to change their zoom and pan settings automatically upon data refresh or maintain the zoom and pan settings saved by the designer. (DDTV-18447)
- A new example workbook called “How to Python” demonstrates how to leverage Python to prepare and transform data using functions like Fibonacci Fan calculations.
These changes give analysts more tools to interact with their data and increases efficiency. Designers can incorporate new automatic functions in their dashboards that help analysts identify outliers and anomalies faster, including in scenarios involving high payload live data feeds and large historical data sets. The ability to use libraries of sophisticated Python programs to handle data transformations makes practically any data source more usable with less time required to configure an analytics workflow.
Alerts
- Alert Notifications now include more details about the value that triggered the alert and the alert condition. (DDTV-18274)
- Users can disable or enable Alerts with a single click. (DDTV-18266)
Alerts are more informative, and it is much easier to handle scenarios that may generate a large number of alerts in short periods of time.
Parameters and Actions
- Time Window parameters can now be used as value source for dashboard parameters when configuring action controls. (DDTV 18139)
- Action buttons with user-generated support the option to suppress the display of the parameter name next to the button. (DDTV18503)
These changes make actions more flexible and help reduce clutter in complex analytical dashboards.
Dashboard Layout and Styling
- Release 2022.1 provides a vastly upgraded framework for workbook styling and themes. Fonts and color settings are more flexible. Each dashboard part has a new, dedicated settings area for everything related to style. A theme created within a workbook can now be published to the theme library on the server with a single click. (DDTV-17074, DDTV-18246)
- Designers can now apply a theme to an existing workbook and opt to override any local style settings. (DDTV-17740)
- Image boxes support horizontal and vertical alignment settings in addition to fit, fill, and stretch on the image. (DDTV-18194)
Designers can build and publish more elegantly styled and consistent dashboards than ever before.
Data Connectivity
- The connector for Microsoft® Excel® has been completed revamped to increase the data loading speed and reduce memory requirements. (DDTV-18310)
- A new Web Data Connector for data accessed through an HTTP URL, including delimited files on a URL or REST services returning XML or JSON. (DDTV-17631)
- This release includes a Google Analytics and Shakti database (beta version) connectors. (DDTV-18489 and DDTV-16185)
Users can now access more data sources in less time than ever before.
Reporting
- When sending scheduled report emails with CSV attachments, there is now an option to package the CSV file in a zip archive. (DDTV17436)
Users can now send very large CSV attachments via email without worrying about file size limitations.
Streams
- This release incorporates several improvements to handling of Python transforms. (DDTV-18068)
Users employing Python-based algorithms can build, test, and deploy their streaming analytics workflows in less time.