SAP Analytics Cloud – Performance Improvement Update

What do you do when your dashboard is slow to load, your users complain about performance, and you’re driving yourself crazy balancing the requirements and more tiles than you can count?

Let me show you 2 features in Release 2019.16 that could help.

If you’re working with Analytics (Application) Designer in SAP Analytics Cloud, then you know that it’s a very powerful dashboard creation tool. But if you’re not careful, then all of those widgets will slow your application down to a crawl.

Let me give you an example.

A colleague built a very complex application in SAC. There were many data models, numerous metrics, and by the time he was done with the prototype, there were 60+ charts and table widgets on his screen. It took 120 seconds to load (much too long for a dashboard to be used by over 8000 people in this company) and a nightmare to maintain. So what could he do?

Luckily, SAP had announced performance improvements for Q3 and Q4 of 2019.

When Release 2019.16 was applied to our tenant, the improvements were dramatic. Loading times were cut down by 75% (30 seconds) and we have some ideas for making it run even faster.

Also released was a new functionality for organizing the 60+ table and chart widgets. If you were to include buttons, shapes, and text widgets, we had over 90+ items on our dashboards. Managing this mess was a welcomed changed.

So what changed in Release 2019.16?

First, invisible charts were no longer initialized when the application started. Since most of the 60+ tiles were called in subsequent steps, we started hiding everything. Here’s where you make that setting.

Second, the tab strip widget was introduced as a way to organize and hide a group of chart tiles. You can think of the tab strip widget in a similar way to pages in a canvas or mobile responsive story.

You no longer have to move the 60+ tiles up or down in the outline pane, which can be a pain when many tiles overlap each other. The chart tiles and text widgets are now grouped into tabs.

Also, you no longer have to manually set the visibility of each tile. The application is smart enough to handle the .setVisibility functionality as the developer or user selects a tab.

I’m also convinced that there are some performance improvements happening behind-the-scenes when you organize your application with tab strips. Chart tiles on tabs (other than the active tab) seem to benefit from the lazy loading of invisible widgets.

In my correspondence with the SAP Analytics Cloud development team, it seems that more improvements are in the works (ETA is Q1.2020)

How about you? Have you noticed any big performance gains with the recent releases?

Conversely, are you struggling with applications that take 60+ seconds to show the first chart? If so, then let me know with an email hau@summerlinanalytics.com. I’d love to help.