2024 was a exciting year for Rill. We welcomed many new team members onboard, launched more features than we can count, and together with our customers solved interesting and challenging data problems.
So as we are closing in on the end of the year I thought I would take some time to reflect and look back at my top 5 features that we shipped with Rill this year.
1. The Pivot Table
We started off the year strong by introducing the Pivot table into Rill that allows users to explore their metrics layer in a tabular format. It might sound strange to put something as “boring” as a Pivot table in the number one spot, but at Rill we cherish the boring. While it might not look flashy or have that “sizzle”, it’s useful. And effective. We would take useful and effective over sizzle any day of the week! Oh and did I mention it has built in time comparison out of the box?
2. Public Links
Often analytics is not something you do in isolation. You might want to share some interesting insights with colleagues or send some data to an external partner to let them explore on their own. With Public Links you can lock a set of filters in place and generate a link that anyone can access without having to log in and we can guarantee that they can only see the data that you intended for them to see.
3. Alerts
Together with Rill’s powerful filtering capabilities you can create Alerts on your metrics. Define thresholds and combined alert criteria's to easily craft alerts such as “If any of my top 5% of advertisers by ad spend sees a drop in impressions from previous day that’s larger then 10% notify me”. You can have Rill either email you or we can alert directly into a Slack channel whenever a alert is triggered. Rill also manages late arriving data and missing ingestions so you can rest easy that even if data is delayed that alerts will be processed whenever new data arrives into Rill.
4. API Endpoints and Metrics SQL
This is probably the most hidden feature of Rill, but extremely powerful. Whenever you move data into another system there needs to be a way to easily access that data from other systems so it’s not locked in. With Rill’s, API Endpoints you can access both models and metrics views directly and expose them as a secure HTTP endpoint that you can query from external systems. You can choose to use either traditional SQL or you can use Rill’s “Metric SQL” which is metric definition aware which takes care of a lot of boilerplate for you and there is full access to full templating language so you pass in parameters and template your response accordingly.
5. Splitting of Metrics views and Dashboard definitions
Ok, I’ll admit it’s hard to call this a feature, but it’s very important nonetheless. Previously in Rill the metrics view and dashboard definition lived within the same file which effectively meant that you could only have a single dashboard per metrics view. This led to very bloated dashboards that included all measures and dimensions and if you wanted to create slices of the dashboard for a smaller group of users you ended up having to duplicate your metrics definitions.
With the split you can now have multiple dashboards per metrics view which greatly reduces the need to duplicate information and reduces the management workload. Also now it’s easier than ever to quickly spin up a reduced dashboard and deploy to a set of users!
2024 summary and a look into the future
We fixed tons of bugs, improved our performance and stability, while also shipping a healthy amount of features, so what’s next? We go even faster of course! This year we laid down the foundation that will allow us to scale for years to come and we can be even faster in bringing new features to you and solving those annoying bugs even more rapidly.
For 2025 we have big plans. We are planning for a new type of dashboard called Canvas, more data connectors, and deeper visualization capabilities within your Explore dashboards, that will all provide insight feeds in Rill Cloud.
Do you have something you want us to build? Please let us know by either dropping by our Discord channel or open a feature request in GitHub, we would love to hear from you!