Highlights

  • With the launch of Atlassian Data Lake and Analytics, users can make custom reports and dashboards to manage data independently.
  • It will allow non-technical users to view their data with pre-built templates and customize it when needed.

Atlassian has launched new data lake and analytics tools to help customers pool, raise a query, and visualize data from all suites of Atlassian products.

The company said it wants to help its customers, including NASA, Airbnb, and Cisco, “see the big picture” in all their work.

At the launch, the Atlassian Data Lake will support the prominent issue surrounding Jira – and project-tracking software and Jira Service Management. But the company plans to extend the support to the complete product suite, including Confluence, Trello, and Bitbucket.

Meanwhile, Atlassian Analytics essentially brings utility to the data lake, allowing companies to access their data in useful ways via interactive dashboards to serve up cross-product and cross-project insights visually. It includes support for both no-code and SQL approaches.

The new analytics product is built upon technology created by Chartio. It is a cloud-based data analytics company that Atlassian acquired last year.

So, how much of a problem does Atlassian’s new data, and analytics suite solve, exactly?

Before today, the customers who wanted to conduct cross-product/project reporting would have to extract data into the spreadsheets or create custom dashboards with BI tools such as Looker, Tableau, and PowerBI. The process was not smooth. It required resources to build and maintain extensive data modeling and deal with slow and restricted APIs.

Though Atlassian Data Lake and Analytics have been developed as intertwined complementary products, they are not bonded with glue. As per Atlassian’s COO Anu Bharadwaj, the company plans to enable companies to connect data lake with third-party intelligence tools to “give customers the flexibility to use their BI tool of choice.”

Another noticeable thing is that Atlassian had previously announced a data lake product for Jira Software under an early preview program. However, last month, the company decided that it would no longer continue with that product as “originally designed”. It said that “it would be taking the architecture in a new direction” and will roll out “a comprehensive analytics offering” for enterprise customers.

Both Atlassian Data Lake and Analytics are available through early access to the program for existing customers. But these customers have to first sign up for the cloud enterprise edition of Jira Service Management or Jira Software.

Experts’ view

“With Atlassian Data Lake, customers now get pre-modeled, enriched data ready for analytics so they don’t have to spend time with data preparation and speed insight generation,” Atlassian’s COO Anu Bharadwaj told VentureBeat. “We also recognize that most customers don’t always have the right expertise or tooling to build custom dashboards. With Atlassian Analytics, they will get a built-in enterprise-grade data visualization capability to analyze data in different ways.”