Data Explorer has always been the crown jewel of Kentik Portal: by any measure this Observability Analytics workbench is our users' most beloved application. As its grown over time, we've kept adding new functionality to it over the years.

As a byproduct, we've heard feedback from our newer users that this Data Explorer beast could be hard to tame as you're making your first steps in Kentik Portal.

As we were ramping up Kentik's AI capabilities, we discovered very early that AI Advisor does an excellent job as a Natural Language Processor that turns human prompts into fully fledged Data Explorer queries - AI Advisor Announcement here

So to facilitate faster queries in Data Explorer, we've added small, buy highly useful feature to AI Advisor when using AI Advisor on the Data Explorer page: Send to Data Explorer.

Learning to use Data Explorer with AI Advisor

When it comes to users new to Data Explorer, we believe there's nothing more efficient than learning its ropes by example.

Starting today, you'll notice that when AI Advisor writes an answer to the chat window on a Data Explorer page that contains a query it has used for analysis, it will now present a Send to Data Explorer button next to it.

When clicked, the Send to Data Explorer button will replace the current query in the main window with an updated one from this step of the prompt response.
The beauty of it is that users can keep iterating over the same query without ever having to set all the query parameters themselves in the Data Explorer query panel. The additional benefit is that after each iteration, a learning user can precisely look at what parameters AI Advisor changed in the query to respond to their prompt, therefore getting a personalized tutorial on setting up their own query!

Here's a sample follow-up to the previous prompt, which will present the results in a table, but also offer the Send to Data Explorer button

... and the result in the main Data Explorer window when clicking the button

But wait... enter Cause Analysis

While piloting Data Explorer via prompt is already a major improvement in itself, we also linked it to Cause Analysis. If you don't remember this incredible AI feature of Data Explorer, take a minute to read the Cause Analysis feature announcement here.

With Cause Analysis, you can ask Kentik AI to inspect a traffic chart and ask it to identify anomalies and analyze them for you: one of the ways to do so was to drag and highlight a visual anomaly and summon the feature as shown in the screenshot below

With this new feature on display today, you can simply ask AI Advisor "What happened on 04/3 around 15:00", and AI Advisor will spontaneously summon Cause Analysis and give you a Send to Data Explorer button for you to access the result of its reasoning as to what may have caused this peak: