What is Yellowfin Signals? Automating Data Discovery

Sifting through vast amounts of data for usable information is both challenging and time-consuming for independent software vendors (ISV) in today’s fast-paced market.

But without a continuous search for timely insights, you risk your end-users missing critical business opportunities, or failing to address emerging issues in their data promptly, potentially leading to dissatisfaction and churn.

The good news is ISVs can more easily provide their customers with real-time, actionable insights right now, enhancing your product value and user satisfaction, without spending as much time or cost in monitoring and analyzing such large and complex data-sets.

One such option is Yellowfin Signals, an automated data discovery feature in our embedded analytics suite. This blog covers all you need to know Signals, and what it brings to your users.

Understanding Yellowfin Signals: What is it?

Signals is an advanced embedded analytics tool unique to Yellowfin that is designed to automatically uncover significant changes and patterns in your business data, and deliver insights directly to the people who need it (your team, your end-users, your partners). 

Signals uses automated business monitoring (ABM) technology to automatically and continuously monitor and analyze your data for statistically relevant changes, and auto-alerts your users to most interesting occurrences and patterns to help guide you toward insights.

The best part of Signals is it provides an explanation and additional analysis in natural language (no technical jargon) for any correlated data changes to help you get started on uncovering the root cause of the change faster and easier (no need to wait for IT to decipher its meaning).

Essentially, with Signals, you know when, what and why something in your data happened. For ISVs, who are constantly seeking ways to add value to their product offerings and differentiate themselves in a competitive market, Yellowfin Signals serves as a pivotal solution.

Read more: Yellowfin Signals: Automated Business Monitoring, Alerts and Analysis

What does Signals monitor?

Signals continuously monitors a variety of changes in your data-sets to give you and your users the widest possible coverage of potential insights, so you never miss a thing. 

Some examples include:

Outliers: Sudden spikes or drops in a metric that fall outside of its expected range.

Breakouts: Metrics that fall above or below of its expected range and stay outside of that range.

Trend changes: When the metric trend changes direction or diverges from the expected range significantly.

Sum changes: When the total aggregate value of a metric goes up or down, from one period to another, in a significant manner.

Volatility changes: Metrics that have a change in frequency. 

Step changes: When the metric has a downward or upward step while maintaining the same overall trend direction.

New variables: When particular data becomes more important by crossing a threshold.

What are the benefits of Yellowfin Signals?

The technology that powers Signals falls under the umbrella of AI analytics, also known as augmented analytics. These two terms refer to the integration of sophisticated technologies into the analytics module of your application, such as automation, artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), natural language query (NLQ) and other tools.

Through this, Signals offers several potential benefits for your business and your users who seek to gain insights from their data by leveraging integrated automation, machine learning and AI within the Yellowfin suite.

The many benefits of Signals can be categorized into three areas:

1. Automated analysis

Automatic detection of important changes: Signals scans your data continuously, identifying significant shifts, trends, and outliers that might escape manual analysis. This reduces the risk of missing crucial information and saves time spent manually sifting through data. It also reduces analysis fatigue.

Reduced human bias: By automating anomaly detection, Signals help eliminate potential biases that can affect manual analysis. This leads to more objective and data-driven insights.

2. Better user experiences

Customizable alerts: ABM tools like Yellowfin Signals allow for customizable alert settings, ensuring that users receive relevant notifications that align with their specific business needs and goals.

Real-time insights: These tools provide real-time alerts on critical data changes and patterns, allowing your end-users to respond faster to opportunities and threats than they could with manual overwatch.

Reduced manual effort: Automated monitoring of business data reduces the need for manual data analysis, saving time and resources, which can be redirected towards more strategic tasks.

Data-driven decisions: You empower your clients with the ability to make decisions based on timely, data-driven insights, enhancing their operational efficiency and strategic outcomes.

3. Enhanced product value

Value add-on: Yellowfin Signals and ABM tools enable ISVs to enrich their software solutions with advanced analytics capabilities, making their products more competitive and appealing to potential customers.

Scalability: These tools can effortlessly scale with the growth of your client businesses, accommodating increasing data volumes and complexity without compromising performance.

Competitive edge: By integrating cutting-edge technologies like ABM and Yellowfin Signals, you can distinguish your offerings significantly for a highly visible competitive edge in the market.

Improved customer retention: By offering actionable insights without manual analysis, you can help your clients make informed decisions faster, leading to increased customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Overall, Signals and its use of advanced AI and automation technology for continuous monitoring and analysis offers many enhancements to your software product's user experience, value and competitive differentiation in an increasingly crowded market.

Learn more: 5 Key Benefits of Automated Business Monitoring Tools

Why is Signals useful?

Ultimately, Signals is designed to be another helpful tool that streamlines the process of analysis for your business and your product's end-users.

Through the use of automation, machine learning and natural language, it provides continuous, reliable monitoring, alerting and analysis of your data, helping to point you in the right direction of interesting statistical deviations in data to discover hidden insights.

It can even help keep your users on top of areas of performance that require attention, well ahead of time, and find changes that manual analysis might not extract as easily.

When combined with other helpful Yellowfin native features such as Guided NLQ and Assisted Insights, Yellowfin Signals can help line-of-business people who may not be necessarily experts with data engage with analytics tools without having to do extensive training or rely on IT for answers. It's all part of Yellowfin's goal to democratize data access for more people, and help build towards the new class of analytics users: The augmented consumer.