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What is Atlassian Data Lake and how can it help me?

Written by Scott Hirst | 12 Apr 2023

Even before the way most companies work changed forever due to the global pandemic, Atlassian have been enabling teams to work, share and collaborate better - giving your teams the tools they need to work differently but still together.

However, having your teams working in their own way, siloed off away from each other, can make reporting and analytics a difficult and tedious process. So, in order provide even more benefit for their customers, Atlassian have introduced two new capabilities for Atlassian Enterprise customers: Atlassian Data Lake and Atlassian Analytics.

Atlassian Data Lake

One of the best features of Atlassian Enterprise is the ability to create as many instances as you need in order for your teams to do their best work. Using only the Atlassian products and Marketplace apps applicable to them means less waste but how do you compare those instances in terms of performance or ROI, when they are so different?

Your Atlassian products such as Jira Software and Jira Service Management are critical systems for managing work across your teams, but before Data Lake you could only build custom reports from cross-product, multiple instances by extracting the data using API and scripts. Atlassian Data Lake makes analysis easy with pre-modeled and enriched fields to speed up insight generation. Data Lake collects the data from your Atlassian portfolio and collects it into one quarriable place.

So imagine your various instances as clouds (a little on-the-nose, I know but go with it), the data from those cloud instances raining down and collecting as a large body of water - that’s the Atlassian Data Lake. All your data in one place, ready for you to sort and sift in whatever way suits your needs.

Right now, you can gather data from a range of fantastic Atlassian Products listed below, and Atlassian are working diligently to expand the range of products that Data Lake can draw from.

  • Jira Software

  • Jira Service Management

  • Jira Work Management

  • Opsgenie

  • Insight

And don’t worry if you also have non-Atlassian sources that you want to import data from, Atlassian have got you covered there too. You can connect your external data sources to the Data Lake in order to get richer, more complete insights. And being built on the enterprise-grade trusted Atlassian platform, you can be certain that your data is safe.

Atlassian Analytics

Built using the technology from Chartio, a cloud based visualisation and analytics solution acquired by Atlassian in 2021, Atlassian Analytics is a simple, flexible hub that seamlessly connects to Atlassian Data Lake and offers users a variety of flexible ways to access and view their data via SQL or no-code. We’ve listed just some of the ways that Atlassian Analytics delivers insights from the Data Lake.

  • Out-of-the-box interactive dashboards
    Cross-project, cross-product overviews of workflows.

  • SQL visualisations
    Run SQL queries directly against the Atlassian Data Lake to use custom dashboards and charts.

  • No-code visualisations
    Don’t want to use SQL? Build reports quickly using Visual SQL, a no-code way of exploring your data.

  • Blend in data from external sources
    Get even more powerful insight into your Atlassian product data by combining with with external data from non-Atlassian sources.

  • Direct connection to external business intelligence (BI) tools - Coming soon!
    Atlassian know that many teams will want to continue to use their preferred BI tools, and they are working hard to offer the ability connect these tools to Atlassian Data Lake, so that you can add their data in to Atlassian Analytics

Harnessing the amazing power and versatility of Atlassian Data Lake and Atlassian Analytics means that each of your teams, no matter how differently they work or what different tools and apps they use, can get tailored recommendations to improve velocity, and team leaders / management can get insights into how to improve overall team health.

Atlassian Data Lake and Atlassian Analytics are exclusively available to Atlassian Enterprise Cloud users - for more information on Atlassian Enterprise, please see our Atlassian Enterprise Solutions page.

Unleash your workforces full potential and work smarter with an Atlassian Cloud Enterprise plan with Atlassian Data Lake and Atlassian Analytics. Get in touch with BDQ to discuss your options - let’s talk about what you need.