“Know thyself.” Socrates said that. But what he should have also said is “know thy customer.” Okay, maybe it would have been strange if Socrates said that, so we’ll leave him out of this since that’s what we’re going to talk about now. Know thy customer.
Today, it’s not enough to know your product inside and out, to have schooled yourself in the ins and outs of building and running a modern digital enterprise. Businesses looking to maximize their relevance need to exist in a near-constant state of evolution, and to do that, you need to be keeping a much closer eye on your customers and business operations. And to do that, you’re going to want top quality data analytics tools to produce powerful data-driven business insights.
Data Analytics
Data analytics tools analyze data (surprise!). All of the various nodes and applications and subsystems that make up your network generate a whole lot of data. And the more data you generate the more difficult it becomes to extract any actual meaning from all of it. It’s just terabytes of junk overwhelming your analysts and making you wonder whether it might be easier to just turn it all off.
That’s where data analytics tools come in. It’s an umbrella term that describes a whole school of tools tailored to a wide variety of use cases, but they all have one thing in common. Data analytics tools are built to sift through all of that data being generated and turn it into bonafide actionable insights. A top tier analytics tool turns data from useless junk to a market strategist’s best friend. Want to get a leg up on anticipating market trends? Data analytics can find past trends buried in your data and help you map out potential predictions for the months to come. With the right set of analytics tools, the possibilities are as boundless as the data itself.
Benefits of Analytics
Data analytics offers a wide range of powerful benefits to any business looking to better understand and serve their customers. These benefits include:
- End-to-end customer journey analysis
With data analytics, you can comprehensively track the journey your customers take from a prospective client to a satisfied buyer. With data not only from sales, but also pre-sales website interactions, incomplete purchasing initiations, as well as post-sales, data analytics can support strategies to duplicate successful customer interactions and solve issues that may have caused other potential customers to click away.
- Full view of customer behavior and preferences
Data analytics can also draw aggregate data based on customer purchasing preferences and general shown interest, allowing you to highlight what products are top sellers, and what areas need more support. Over time, this data offers potential for long term strategic profile building, helping your enterprise better understand the archetypical customer that you are attracting, while at the same time showing what key areas and demographics are being left behind.
- Real-time customer information
Best of all, when used in conjunction with a sufficiently advanced Data Stream service, data analytics can render all of this information in real-time. Allowing you to adjust and adapt moment to moment, as consumer trends and patterns change. Real-time analytics means you’ll never be left behind as the world changes around you, because you’ll be right there, changing with it.
Observability and Monitoring
Data analytics tools are backed by two principle design philosophies: Monitoring and Observability. Monitoring, the more well-known principle, is the belief that we should strive to make tools that can view and process the internal data of our systems and networks as richly and comprehensively as possible. Observability focuses on achieving the same goal of total system-wide visibility from the other end. Where monitoring focuses on tools built to see and understand the inner workings of your system, observability focuses on systems designed to be seen and understood by those tools. See, two sides of the same coin, working in tandem to offer total system transparency. When choosing your analytics tools, it is always better to choose a package built along principles of not just monitoring, but observability as well.
Analytics through Azion
Here at Azion, we pride ourselves on our customer-focused approach, paying close attention to your edge computing needs so that we can continue to provide cutting edge services and applications. Our data analytics package is a suite of tools designed to streamline your data processing and enhance your understanding of your customer base. Below, you’ll find an introduction to some of our most exciting new data analytics tools, what they do, and how they can be wielded in concert to enhance and clarify your high-level strategic planning.
Real-Time Metrics
Real-Time Metrics uses customizable metrics to evaluate the data generated by your platform and applications. We’ve built Real-Time Metrics to be fully integratable with third party applications, offering high-level system-wide transparency. Real-Time Metrics loops you in to a centralized data hub that grows and updates in real time as new data is delivered. Because of its ability to track the respective performances of applications, Real-Time Metrics can deliver crucial insights into your user traffic patterns, offering a clear-headed path to mapping day by day revenue sources, opening up the inner workings of your enterprise with a kind of digital x-ray vision. Since the data Real-Time Metrics processes can be filtered through dozens of specialized metrics, Real-Time Metrics can be adapted to new needs and use cases on the fly, offering a myriad of ways to identify system-wide issues and make future-facing strategic plans. It’s a powerful generalist tool, similar to a high-powered telescope, offering an honest, data-driven view of your digital infrastructure on a wide-scope, macro scale. For more fine detail work, you’re going to want to look to our next tool: Real-Time Events.
Real-Time Events
Real-Time Events is the microscope to Real-Time Metrics telescope. Rather than offering a sweeping view of the digital cosmos, Real-Time Events tackles singular events with a highly specific, laser focus. It does this using a complex query system, allowing you to build a sophisticated and unique query to seek out the answers to specific key questions. This query feeds off the same massive data pool that powers Real-Time Metrics broad metric based scans, but its greater singularity of purpose enables it to collect fine-grain details in pursuit of its answer. Real-Time Events is the perfect tool, when you know exactly what question you want to ask. If you’re looking towards restructuring the monetization of a specific function of a specific product with a specific target audience in mind, Real-Time Events will take you on a deep dive into the knitty gritty, showing you in-depth data on current customer usage and performance, as well as highlighting the successes and failures of similar monetization initiatives. Its quick resolving queries cut into the tiniest niches of your enterprise with surgical precision, providing that critical micro-analysis aspect that any company must include when in pursuit of achieving total digital transparency and observability.
Edge Pulse
A novel subroutine of Real-Time Events, Edge Pulse takes RTE principles and flips the script. Instead of narrowing in on the minutiae of your enterprise, Edge Pulse turns its attention outward, focusing on user experience and the customer side of things. With Edge Pulse enabled, customers accessing your applications generate real user monitoring data, offering insights into consumer trends as well as highlighting areas where customer attention wavers. While Real-Time Metrics and Real-Time Events offer insights into your application performance, Edge Pulse provides insights into the perception of your application performance, which is just as vital. Edge Pulse allows you to catch hold of significant trends and taste shifts by zooming in on what your customers have liked, do like, and will like about your product offering. By paying your customer the attention they deserve, Edge Pulse ensures that you can offer them the products and services that are the perfect fit for them.
Together, Edge Pulse, Real-Time Metrics, and Real-Time events provide a nexus of data analytics capabilities, able to provide rich and complex insights from a multitude of angles and focuses. As a product suite, they represent Azion’s belief in system transparency. You should always be able to see what is happening in your system, and why it is happening, in real time.
Data Stream
Of course, analytics tools are only as good as the data that feeds them, and that’s where Data Stream comes in. Azion Data Stream is an analytics enablement tool, providing consistent and fault-tolerant real-time data delivery to support and empower our own and third party data analytics tools. Designed to service the needs of our own edge platform, Azion Data Stream is built to handle the raw data generated by thousands of edge nodes, giving it truly impressive processing power. Plus, it’s equipped with state of the art, end-to-end encryption, ensuring that all of that data remains accessible to you and only you.
Summary
Data analysis is a mandatory procedure for any modern enterprise looking to grow to meet the challenges of an ever-shifting market. And manual analysis is quite simply incapable of handling the volume of data generated daily. It’s time to automate your analytics with powerful tools like the Azion Data Analytics product suite. Analytics allows you to take control of your data, harnessing its power to better hone your understanding of your enterprise, your market, and your personal strategic philosophy. If you’re ready to rethink the way you use your data, give analytics a try today.
