Best Practices and Performance Limits for Flex Insights

This guide assumes you have a good understanding of the Flex Insights Data Model.

The performance of reports in your Flex Insights workspace depends on several factors. Some include size of the workspace, frequency and size of data loads, and the complexity of the reports/dashboards in the workspace. These factors could interfere with each other and have a combined impact on the performance of your workspace reports. We recommend the following best practices and performance limits for optimal performance of reporting dashboards in your Flex Insights workspace.

We recommend reviewing the following settings to reduce rendering/execution time of reports in a dashboard:

• Metric definition. Metrics that have complex calculations or data (facts or attributes) from multiple Data Sets usually take longer to compute. Reducing the number of complex metrics in a report will help in faster execution of the report.
• Overall load of the workspace. Users rendering the same reports share cached resources and experience better performance. If there are many users accessing different reports, it is difficult for the workspace to leverage caching, impacting performance of the reports. Users accessing fewer reports per dashboard will increase chances of caching and performance of the reports.
• Data refresh interval. The lower the frequency of data refresh, the faster the report load time will be. This is because every data refresh invalidates caching so the more frequently workspaces are refreshed there will be less caching of reporting data. We recommend keeping the default 60-minute refresh interval as Flex Insights is not designed for real-time monitoring purposes.
• Size of your Flex Insights workspace. As the size of reporting data in your workspace increases, it adds latency to execution of the reports. This is because the metrics are calculated for a larger duration of reporting data. Report filters and dashboard filters significantly reduce the size of reported data (for example by filtering by a shorter date range).
• Save dashboard filters. Enabling "Saved Views" lets you save frequently used dashboard filter settings as a named dashboard view. This feature is especially convenient if you need to switch frequently between multiple filter settings.
• Method of accessing the reports. Rendering reports in the user interface has the highest priority and provides interactive data exploration. Rendering reports via API and sending scheduled emails has lower priority and may take longer.

Please refer to our Twilio Support page for more details on best practices of using Flex Insights.

We have soft limits on the number of dashboards you can define. Staying within these limits ensures good user interface performance.

Reports have a limited number of measures and attributes you can use in them. If you need to see more attributes or measures, you can build a dashboard that contains multiple reports on one canvas.

Flex Insights enables you to send CSV reports and PDF dashboards by email to other users in Flex and also to other people in the company that do not have a Flex account.

We highly recommend using the Flex Insights user interface instead of sending reports by emails. The user interface always shows the latest data and enables users to interact with the data and explore it if they want to do so.

These pertain to limits enforced in Flex Insights Historical Reporting API. You can use the API to export data from any report created from your Flex Insights Analytics Portal.