Gaining Deeper Insights into Institutional Data

LabStats has been delivering data-as-a-service solutions to higher education institutions for nearly two decades. Our commitment lies in providing the most dependable and comprehensive data, meticulously tailored to meet the specific requirements of IT teams within colleges and universities. In fact, the first version of LabStats was developed by a university computer lab manager who was trying to find a better way to do his job.

We at LabStats have recently improved our ability to offer access to robust historical data through expanded API endpoints and thoughtfully designed Power BI Dashboard Templates.

Empowering Institutional Data

Here is a quick overview of what you can do with LabStats and Power BI:

1. Run big reports.
2. Find software and hardware with zero usage quickly.
3. Create and save reports with custom criteria.
4. Email reports on a schedule automatically.*
5. Schedule reports to refresh automatically.*
6. Create dashboards for each member of your team.*
7. Build custom alerts.*
8. Integrate other data with LabStats data (student management system data, financial data).

*Requires paid Power BI Service.

Today, we are empowering our users to gain deeper insights into the hardware and software usage throughout their organizations by combining LabStats data with other institutional data sources.

Connecting LabStats Data to Power BI Service

There are many advantages to connecting your LabStats data to our Power BI service:

1. Review a year's worth of data—or more—in one visualization.
2. See how campus computer usage impacts broader goals, including graduation rates, budgets, grades, etc.
3. Retrieve the facts that matter to you in the format that works best for you.
4. Update your reports with fresh data automatically.
5. Provide each team member with an individualized view of the data.
6. Find hardware and software that can be cut (and won't be missed).

Combining Data Sources for Deeper Insights

LabStats data can be combined with other data sources to build a more complete picture of what's happening at your institution. Following are some other forms of pertinent data:

• Demographic data: Discover how students from specific majors or demographic groups use technology or software and uncover relationships to student success by combining LabStats data with the student management system at your institution.
• Financial data: Understand the granular cost of software (for instance, the cost per launch of a specific software) by combining LabStats data with financial data.
• Inventory: Compare inventory levels to actual usage to gain insights that can help with software negotiations, find unused computers, and optimize tech facilities by combining LabStats data with inventory programs.
• Security: Look for user patterns at precise times and in specific locations to identify security vulnerabilities and risks by combining LabStats data with security systems data.
• Utilities: Understand power-consumption trends by comparing technology location and usage data to known power consumption information.

How can LabStats data be combined with all these other data sources? The answer is simple: business intelligence tools.

Connecting LabStats Data to BI Tools

LabStats offers access to robust historical data through expanded API endpoints that allow you to join usage data with various other data sources through the following applications: Power BI, Tableau, Excel, Qlick, R, Python, and SQL tools.

By integrating LabStats data with other sources, what larger objectives could your team potentially address?

With LabStats data in Power BI, you can analyze your data in even more ways and over extended time frames, and build apps, tools, dashboards, and alerts. LabStats revolutionized how computer and application usage statistics are collected in networked IT environments, and now it's more powerful and versatile than ever.