Jovana Raskovic (Product Manager, Clarivate) · 4:30–5:30 PM · Kansas City Room · Vega Track · Tuesday, April 14
Speaker: Jovana Raskovic
Jovana Raskovic presented Vega Reports — Clarivate’s new unified business intelligence platform that brings reporting and analytics to the entire Public ecosystem. Built on Metabase (an open-source BI tool comparable to Tableau or Power BI) with a Postgres backend and a secure data lakehouse architecture, Vega Reports is included at no additional cost with a Vega Discover subscription. The session covered preset dashboards, the query builder and native SQL interfaces, an OverDrive integration preview, a Metabot AI proof of concept, and detailed rollout timelines for Discover, Polaris, and Sierra.
One intelligent BI platform unifying reporting and analytics across the Public ecosystem. Powered by a secure data lakehouse and built on Metabase — an open-source BI tool comparable to Tableau or Power BI — with a Postgres database backend. Vega Reports is included with every Vega Discover subscription at no additional cost. The platform is consortia and international ready.
Single login — ILS and Vega data unified in one place. No switching between systems to get the data you need.
AI tools and modern visualizations built into the platform. Reports can be scheduled, shared, and bookmarked.
Data protected within the secure lakehouse architecture. GDPR and CCPA compliant.
Third-party data integration (Cloudio) and engagement reporting — data sources that go beyond what the ILS alone can provide.
Four Early Access partners — Phoenix Public Library, STELLA, Mid-Hudson Library System, and New York Public Library — collaborated with the Vega Reports team over several weeks, providing hands-on feedback that shaped the product before general availability.
Vega Reports for Discover requires an active Vega Discover subscription. Polaris and Sierra customers already have LX Starter included with their ILS subscription, which enables the connection needed to access Vega Reports. LX Starter does not need to be actively used — Clarivate simply recommends having it enabled to support access to Vega Reports. Once roles are assigned, Vega Reports appears in the left-hand navigation menu within Vega Discover.
Role assignment is handled through Vega Discover User Management. Roles can be assigned at the main site, collection site, or kiosk site level.
Full access license. Main site admins get both the query builder and native SQL access. Collection site admins get query builder only (no SQL access).
View-only license. Consumers can view and interact with reports created by admins but cannot build new queries.
Three preset dashboard categories ship with Vega Reports. These dashboards are read-only and are the same for both admin and consumer roles. Data is collected using Pendo, ingested into the data lakehouse via API, and refreshed every 24 hours. Data collection begins as soon as a library enables Vega Reports, with up to one week of historical data backfilled. From there, data continues to accumulate over time to support trend analysis.
User activity across Discover — unique visitors (distinct count), visitor frequencies, and engagement patterns.
Top searches, search performance metrics, and weekly trends.
Home page interactions, click patterns, and marketing campaign effectiveness.
Sharing & filtering: Dashboards can be shared via email or PDF, and bookmarked for quick access. A site filter allows filtering by site URL — especially useful for consortia with multiple locations. Each card on the dashboard includes an info tooltip explaining the metric.
Beyond the preset dashboards, Vega Reports offers two approaches for building custom reports. Custom reports can be exported as CSV or Excel, and custom report visualizations are fully customizable.
A simple select-option menu interface — no coding required. Select a data source, join tables, add filters, summarize, and aggregate. Both data models and data tables are available. The toolbar provides: Filter, Summarize, Join data, Sort, Row limit, and Custom column.
Direct Postgres SQL access for Reports Admins at the main site level. Write and execute SQL queries against the data lakehouse for maximum flexibility.
Visualizations are available for reports built either way — Query Builder or Native SQL. Options include bar, line, pie, table, pivot table, gauge, funnel, map, and more. The platform auto-selects the best visualization based on the query results, and everything is fully customizable — colors, naming conventions, and axes can all be adjusted.
Example SQL query — aggregating Discover tracking events by type for a given year:
SELECT
tt.track_type_name,
SUM(te.num_events) AS sum
FROM "discover".track_events te
INNER JOIN "discover".track_types tt
ON te.track_type_id = tt.id
WHERE
te.last_time >= CAST('2024-01-01 00:00:00Z' AS timestamp)
AND te.last_time < CAST('2025-01-01 00:00:00Z' AS timestamp)
GROUP BY tt.track_type_name
ORDER BY tt.track_type_name ASCClarivate is working on integrating OverDrive checkouts data into Vega Reports for both Polaris and Sierra users. A demo was shown at the sales booth during the conference.
Unique digital checkouts, number of checkouts, and average lending period. A print copy checkout flag (yes/no) indicates whether a given title was also checked out in print within the selected timeframe.
Owning branch and checkout branch filters allow libraries to drill into circulation data by location.
The team is exploring two approaches: patron ID matching in the backend, or product ID mapping for titles. Top 100 checked-out digital titles with print copy overlap analysis will help libraries understand format preferences.
A variety of trends across time frames, popular titles, and print vs. digital overlap — giving libraries insight into how their collections are performing across formats.
Metabase includes an AI tool called Metabot that enables natural language interaction with reports and data. Currently, Metabot does not support self-hosted environments (which is how Vega Reports operates), so this is a proof of concept only — not shipping yet. Jovana showed a video demo using sample data to illustrate the capabilities.
Ask questions in natural language and get answers from your data through a conversational interface.
Create reports using the query builder via plain English prompts. Step-by-step guided report creation walks users through the process.
Generate SQL queries from natural language prompts — no need to know Postgres syntax.
Analyze and ask questions about existing charts. Metabot can also identify and fix errors in SQL code. Reports can be saved directly to a personal collection.
Jovana on AI: “This is the future. We can’t run away from it. As long as you run away from something, it’s gonna get you sooner rather than later.”
The first phase of the rollout is complete. Additional releases of Vega Reports for Discover are continuing, with the goal of ensuring that all current Vega Discover subscribers receive access by the end of Q2 2026. Monthly releases will continue with the Vega Suite thereafter.
Future plans: Staff Audit data, Programs data, and Mobile data integration. The team is also considering adding Vega LX Starter data.
Early Access: Q3 2026. Delivery: Q4 with Polaris Release. The team is actively seeking early access partners.
Focus: Simply Reports restoration plus eContent and circulation data. OverDrive integration in the same timeline if possible. A survey was sent and received 127 responses — strong demand for circulation reports. Will include dashboards and a reporting folder with list reports.
Early Access: Q3–Q4 2026. Release: Early 2027. The survey has not yet been sent — Jovana is collecting feedback now and plans to send the survey in the coming weeks.
Focus: Web Management reports and Decision Center analysis. Not all Sierra users actively use Web Management reports — many are focused on Decision Center, which will be incorporated into the platform.
What Sierra-specific customers should know about Vega Reports:
Product Manager for Vega Reports, based in the Belgrade office. Almost one year at Clarivate, with over six years of experience in analytics.
Development Manager for Vega Reports. Leads a small development team building and maintaining the platform.
Dashboard exports are limited to PDF or email only. Custom reports can be exported as CSV or Excel.
The database backend is Postgres. Native SQL queries use standard Postgres syntax.
Direct integrations with external BI tools (e.g., connecting your own Tableau instance) are not currently available, but the team is exploring the possibility.
Yes — you can schedule reports to be delivered to individuals on particular days.
Not being considered at this time. Jovana: “Let’s take one step at a time.”
Pendo is a product analytics and user-engagement platform used by SaaS companies to understand how customers interact with their software. Clarivate uses Pendo to instrument Vega Discover — capturing the usage events that ultimately flow into Vega Reports. Pendo is the instrumentation layer in the pipeline; Metabase is the BI layer that surfaces it.
Founded in 2013, headquartered in Raleigh, North Carolina. Publicly referenced customers include Verizon, Morgan Stanley, Salesforce, Okta, LabCorp, OpenTable, and Zendesk. Pendo competes with Mixpanel, Amplitude, and Heap in the product-analytics space.
Pendo embeds a tracking snippet into a web or mobile application to capture user behavior — page views, clicks, search terms, feature usage, and session patterns. Beyond analytics, the platform also offers in-app guidance (tooltips, walkthroughs, announcements) and user feedback collection (NPS, in-app surveys). For the Vega Reports pipeline, the behavioral-analytics capture is the piece that matters.
Pendo captures raw Vega Discover usage events. Clarivate pulls those events out via Pendo’s API into the data lakehouse on a 24-hour cadence. Metabase then queries the lakehouse to power the dashboards and custom reports that library staff see inside Vega Reports. Understanding this layering helps explain a few behaviors: the 24-hour refresh is set by the ingest job from Pendo into the lakehouse, and the “up to one week of historical backfill” on enablement reflects how far back Clarivate can pull existing Pendo events when a library turns Vega Reports on.
Activity in Vega Discover → captured by the Pendo snippet → ingested via Pendo’s API into Clarivate’s data lakehouse (refreshed every 24 hours) → queried and visualized by Metabase → surfaced to admins and consumers as Vega Reports.
