Mistakes to avoid

Remove metrics / dimensions without proper warnings

The explorations that you build are used by your team mates to answer their questions. If you do brutal changes to how they can ask their questions, like by deleting a dimension or a metric without notice, it can have a bad impact on their daily routine.

In order to properly deprecate a dimension / metric from an exploration:

• Check its usage:

  • In dashboards and questions

  • In the query log for people that are using the Exploration in an adhoc manner

• Contact the regular users of the exploration to warn them about the upcoming deletion of the Dimension / Metric

• Mark the dimension / metric as being DEPRECATED in its name to avoid future and to make sure that people will migrate their queries to the proper dimensions / metrics

• Log the deprecation notice in your Exploration description with the start date of the deprecation and the date of the upcoming deletion

• At the communicated date, delete the dimension / metric and log its deletion

As this process can take time, it's best to do it for multiple metrics / dimensions at the same time to save time.

Creating dimensions / metrics duplicates

Whenever you create a new dimension or metric, check beforehand if the exploration doesn't already contains the same configuration.

It's really easy to just "create" dimensions / metrics without checking if they don't already exists with a different name, but it ends up creating duplicates of the same information.

When presented with duplicates, end users are unsure of which one to use and it increase the maintenance cost of the exploration as you now have to maintain 2+ configuration for the same thing.