Managing and Leveraging Insight Apps

By defining Insight Apps, SAP has greatly reduced your workload for preparing reports. Many steps that required in-depth, prolonged thought, along with tedious system tasks in the past, have already been made more efficient.

The result of an installed Insight App is a dashboard, which is one of its key components, especially from a business user perspective. Technically, it is an SAP Analytics Cloud story. It is fed by underlying SAP Datasphere models. All these models are automatically created during the installation of an Insight App. You can deploy all required models with one click. Even roles are generated. You just have to assign them to the designated business users.

An Insight App consists of a visualization object and its underlying models. It contains diagrams and may contain tables and other elements to display its data. The data for these elements is provided from Data Products and SAP-Datasphere-based data models. You'll now take a closer look at the high-level object for visualization.

In a simple case, the Insight App provides data from a single Data Product. In such a simple case, the data is presented in form of an SAP Analytics Cloud story as a no-code dashboard based on an underlying Analytic Model and view. But in more typical cases Insight Apps are based on several models and Data Products or they contain some coding. It is planned to further enhance the variety of available Insight Apps, including more topics and more features to provide full-fledged, SAP-managed software-as-a-service Insight Apps. It may contain additional elements of professional coding to solve real customer problems in a meaningful way.

Technically, an Insight App such as Working Capital needs SAP Analytics Cloud standard components. More advanced Insight Apps using other SAP Business Technology Platform services or with additional requirements are planned. Insight Apps are not deployed for third-party tools.

Installing an Insight App is the easiest way to make SAP-delivered content available. Log on to the SAP Business Data Cloud Cockpit and search through the available Insight Apps. The available Insight Apps have a section called Documentation, where you can check if it serves your needs. Moreover, you can already see which Data Products are associated with this Insight App.

Installation creates SAP-managed objects. The following effects take place when you successfully install an Insight App:

1. The status of the Insight App changes from available to installed.
2. Associated Data Products are installed and data access is established. This may include automated data replication from the business application. It may include data transformation services. This step requires the backend services called Foundation Services.
3. An SAP-managed Insight App space is created in SAP Datasphere to contain the Insight App content. Additional spaces may be involved, depending on the design of the Insight App.
4. SAP Datasphere artifacts, such as replication flows, tables, views, and analytic models, are created in this space to ingest, prepare, and expose the required data to SAP Analytics Cloud.
5. Scoped roles are generated for the new space.
6. A dashboard is generated to visualize the data. This is typically deployed as an SAP Analytics Cloud story. SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) is planned to be another technical option.

Keep in mind that for other objects, different terms for deployment are used.

The Insight App is based on a live connection to SAP Datasphere. All navigation options that SAP Analytics Cloud could support for this connection type are available to be used when building an Insight App, such as defining filters, selecting members or dimensions, or setting a variable value. A typical use case for such a variable is the target currency of a currency translation.

Suppose you have found and installed an Insight App that almost suits your needs, but your requirements have changed and you need an additional value in your dashboard. However, the SAP-managed Insight App is protected against any changes, so directly adding your own calculations is not supported. You cannot copy an entire Insight App. However, you can copy most of its components.

The easiest way to enable enhancements is to copy the SAP Analytics Cloud story of your Insight App. Then, you enhance or adjust the copy. Note that if you re-install the Insight App after SAP provides an update, the new story will not be affected by changes on the original story. However, the copy will be based on the same Analytic Model. This means that changes of the Analytic Model will affect both stories.

In other use cases, you need some complex data logic, or you want to add a data access control to enable authorization checks on row-level of your data. In these cases, you copy and change the underlying models.

Watch the following video to see different use cases and the corresponding steps for creating stories that suit your needs.

In this lesson, you have learned how Insight Apps are installed, copied, and enhanced.