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kendra_mcclanahan
kendra_mcclanahan
Gainsight Employee ⭐️⭐️
March 24, 2017

Insert zeros when usage is missing on a weekly trending report

  • March 24, 2017
  • 14 replies
  • 51 views
I wasn't able to find a similar community post (apologies if this exists already). We've recently come across this issue with Cisco and a few other customers. When there is no data for a time period, that date period is removed from the report and it's connected to the next available date. We'd like the ability to display the missing dates as Zeros to provide an accurate view into the usage. This creates a more consistent experience for the end users. I've provided 2 customer scenarios below.

Cisco Use Case:
Trend view on R360 only displays months where data is processed, creating jumps in the timeline and it's not clear to CuSMs when there are months where there were not any scores for that particular month.



Customer #2 Use Case:
Customer2 is using our Segment connector - when there is no usage in a given week, the customer doesn't display any data (common use case). Given the volume of data they are sending us for various events, we'd want to avoid the workaround of inserting zeros for every data point that is missing for that week. Here is an example of a report where data is missing for a few weeks.



Does anyone else have use cases to share? Are there any workarounds that you've used that don't require inserting zero? 

Are there any plans to address this with product?

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      dstokowski
      dstokowski
      Gainsight Employee ⭐️⭐️
      March 31, 2017
      This goes back to our consideration of some kind of time dimension or a way to address time specifically in visualizations.  This would also be something we would need in considering time series calculations (no data = zero).  Time is a known thing (whether data exists for each time period or not) so it does seem possible to "tell the system that there are x number of data points".  Writing zeroes creates a lot of extra data and is a lot of extra work.  
        sdrostgainsightcom
        sdrostgainsightcom
        Gainsight Employee ⭐️⭐️⭐️
        July 11, 2017
        Catching back up on this since this is one of the open Cisco requests that will be discussed Wed-Thurs (July 12-13) - I'm totally on board with Denise's comment above - treating all periods in the range as an x-axis point.

        Guessing that this has fallen off the radar a little since we haven't been pushing it - is this something that's in our backlog? Something before end of calendar year?
        Scott Drost, Gainsight -- Principal Customer Success Architect
        dan_ahrens
        dan_ahrens
        Expert ⭐️⭐️⭐️
        January 9, 2018
        Hey all - I'm reading through this and would love to understand a bit more on the thought process behind not using 0 as a proxy for null on a given x-axis (date) point. 

        From a purely geometric standpoint, some value must be assigned if we create an x-axis point for date, correct? The only geometric equivalent for absence of data (null) is zero. Or is there something that I'm missing here? 

        Or is it just that you want to know the difference between these two scenarios (using Kendra's original use case of a Segment connection):
        * Segment sent no data for the specified date
        * Segment sent data for the specified date and the data it sent was zero
        ?
        VP of Customer Success at Forcepoint
        minh_phan
        minh_phan
        Gainsight Employee ⭐️⭐️
        May 1, 2018
        Per Venky: we are evaluating this for aggregate report with day, week, month summarization. Not intended for a flat report where already aggregated numbers are brought into GS. Med sized effort as it needs to be supported across databases for all summarization options (day, week month etc) and performance also need to be considered. Do we replace missing data as 0, maintain trend, or add gap?
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