How Ping Identity uses embedded analytics dashboards to bring key metrics to customers

This is a guest post by Louise Watson, Product Marketing Manager, at Ping Identity.

In this post, we discuss how Ping Identity uses Amazon QuickSight to embed analytics into the PingOne Cloud Platform to enhance customer experience and gain a better understanding of customer behavior with data-driven insights. Ping Identity is a provider of identity and access management solutions that lead to frictionless and secure digital experiences. Ping’s services and embedded analytics dashboards make it easy for organizations to manage and control how their users access digital resources and apps.

We’re the proud solution provider for over 60% of the Fortune 500 companies. We offer hundreds of integration kits, connectors, and adapters to help our customers quickly deploy capabilities such as identity verification, digital credentials management, single sign-on, multi-factor authentication, and much more in an open way that prevents vendor lock-in. Our platform lets customers choose their preferred deployment method, from fully on premises to hybrid, multi-cloud, or cloud-first.

Visualizing identity and access management

At Ping, we make creating delightful and safe digital user experiences easy for our customers. Our orchestration solution, PingOne DaVinci, allows users of all technical abilities to create, test, optimize, and deploy workflows without coding.

While we pride ourselves on offering a premium user experience for our customers, we heard in our annual net promoter score (NPS) survey that we needed to improve the visibility of our services. For example, one of our technology services customers wrote, “Canned reports are of no value”.

We needed to show customers metrics about the impact of our products, the value of the actions they are taking, the ROI of our products, end-user ease of use and satisfaction, the overall security posture and risk, internal system-level logs, and more.

Having dashboards that, at a glance, can tell you if everything is normal or reveal where attention is needed is vital for mission-critical systems like identity. Customers want confidence that the system is operating as it should—and the ability to act based on what the data shows.

Internally, Ping needed a better understanding of how customers used our products and where they were deriving the most value.

Clearly, we needed a new data visualization approach and robust, clear dashboards showing crucial information and metrics for our customers. Initially, we had our product teams authoring individual dashboards to explore data; however, the result was a need for more consistency and very basic visualizations.

Instead of building each dashboard individually with hard coding, we wanted an embedded analytics solution to provide better value to customers, consistency, and improve our solutions’ “curb appeal.”

Secure embedded analytics with QuickSight

Though we evaluated a handful of other embedded analytics dashboard vendors, including Yellowfin and Sisense, we decided to go with QuickSight for our products.

There were several reasons for this, but key to our decision was the fact that QuickSight offered the following:

• Works with our high-scale, multi-tenant platform – This was a crucial feature and something that the other embedded analytics products we explored weren’t capable of.
• Doesn’t require dataset duplication – We can’t duplicate our datasets out to vendor data stores for governance and regulatory reasons. QuickSight allows us to pull data straight from our product, solution, and integration data stores without the need for holding the data.
• Doesn’t require us to rebuild our product – We didn’t want to have to recreate or duplicate our product in the vendor’s tool or infrastructure. QuickSight was ideal because it could be embedded directly into our existing products without needing a complicated, fragile mapping from one platform to another.

Additionally, Ping highly values our relationship with AWS. According to Matt Bates, Ping’s Directory of Tech Alliances, “When working with customers who have cloud-centric initiatives, Ping Identity knows we have a partner in AWS who can help us champion customer success.”

PingOne DaVinci: Digital identity made sleeker with embedded analytics

Because DaVinci is the core of the PingOne Cloud Platform, Ping opted to start with that dashboard in two phases before adding unified dashboards to the rest of our products and services. We decided on a four-phase product dashboard roadmap designed to build upon and add to the platform’s full breadth of capabilities. QuickSight is an intrinsic part of our platform development plans.

The first DaVinci dashboard phase took about two quarters. However, most of that work effort was around erecting all the infrastructure and components needed for building and deploying all future dashboards. We anticipate much faster implementation with the subsequent dashboard phases.

DaVinci now has a built-in analytics dashboard, allowing customers greater control and visibility over their products.

Data from each chart can be exported or copied for use in your own sheets and reports.

Using an embedded analytics platform like QuickSight has made it easy for Ping to inject consistency into our product visuals and provide a more streamlined experience for customers. It has also allowed us to create more attractive and functional dashboards than we could create in-house (we’re security people after all, not visual designers!).

“Using off-the-shelf analytics tools like QuickSight instead of building the visual components of the dashboard (charts, tables, etc.) and maintaining them from scratch likely saved us several months of effort. And we’re getting faster as we go.”

–Yuri Kroz, ​​Senior Software Engineer, Ping Identity

And the result?

Since Ping introduced the first phase of the DaVinci embedded dashboard, we’ve had overwhelmingly positive customer feedback. Anecdotal evidence suggests higher customer satisfaction:

“Ping Identity’s new dashboard is another feature which I really like…I am looking forward to continuously working with Ping products and their support team.”

–Major insurance carrier, customer of Ping since 2019

Internally, it’s also been super useful. The DaVinci dashboard aligns with our new pricing model, which means customers (and ourselves) can use our usage tracking to assist with billing.

Other than that, most of our results so far sit in the product itself. With QuickSight, we’ve been able to offer better data visualization, improved reporting, and easier dashboard authoring for our team.

The proof is in the data: we currently have over 3.5 billion identities within our platform (and counting!). In the near future, we’re looking forward to rolling out the rest of our dashboard phases, starting with the development of custom analytics that includes integration data, like connector and capability usage. Next in line will be the development of our PingOne Protect, SSO, and MFA service dashboards.

“At Ping, we want dashboards to present the value we provide to customers. Not just how busy the system is, but to quantify the benefits—more security with less user friction.”

–Bjorn Aannestad, Director, Product Management, Ping Identity

Level up your products with QuickSight

With the embedded analytics capabilities of QuickSight, creating useful (and aesthetically pleasing) dashboards for our customers is incredibly simple.

With these added capabilities, Ping has maintained our impressive NPS and offered greater value to our customers.

Replicate Ping’s success with your products—check out QuickSight and try it yourself.

About the author

Louise Watson is a Product Marketing Manager at Ping Identity. She began her career in public media, non-profit fundraising, and political advocacy after finishing her master’s in political management at George Washington University in Washington, DC. She specialized in membership, fundraising, and marketing at Rocky Mountain PBS and Donor Development Strategies before transitioning to lead customer and product development at ACD Direct. While at ACD, Louise became a certified Product Master via the Pragmatic Institute. She is now the Product Marketing Manager at Ping Identity and an avid skier and golfer in her spare time.