Our Products & Services
Getting Started
First Time Setup
Getting Started With Jobs
Getting Started with Ticketing
Setting Sonar up for Billing
Getting Started with Accounts
Getting Started with Inventory
Baseline Configuration
User Specific Resources
How To: Using Sonar's Customer Portal
Accounts
Account Types: Overview & Example Use Cases
Account Statuses: Overview & Example Use Cases
Account Management View: Overview
Scheduled Events: Overview & Use Cases
Notes & Tasks: Best Practices & Use Cases
Child Accounts: Best Practices & How Tos
Disconnecting an Account
Understanding the Affordable Connectivity Program
FCC Broadband Data Collection (BDC) Filings: How Sonar Can Help
Account List View: Overview
Specify Account ID upon Creation
Lead Intake Form Processing
Account Groups: Overview & Example Use Cases
CPUC Fixed Broadband Deployment by Address
Serviceable Addresses: Overview and Usage
FCC Data Exports: General Overview and Usage
Creating a New Account
Billing
Setting up Bank Account & Credit Card Processors
Billing Settings
Billing Defaults
Taxes Setup
General Ledger Codes: Overview
Services: Overview
Building a Data Service
Building Packages
Delinquency Billing Best Practices
Accounts in Vacation Mode
Batch Payments & Deposit Slips: Overview
Creating Discounts for Services and Packages
Setting Up Payment Methods and Taking Payments
Canadian ACH tool
Printed Invoice Batches: Overview
Delinquency Exclusions: Overview and Use Cases
Multi-Month Billing & Multi-Month Services
How to Take Bank Account Payments
Email Invoice Batch: Overview
Manual Transactions
ACH Batching: Overview
Billing Calculator
General Transactions: Best Practices
Usage Based Billing Policies: Overview and Usage
How to: Adding a Service to an Account
Usage Based Billing Policy Free Periods: Overview and Usage
Using Tax Exemptions - How To
Avalara: Overview & Setup
Print to Mail
Communication
Setting up an Outbound Email Domain
Triggered Messages: Setup
Call Logs: General Best Practices
Using the Mass Message Tool
Saved Messages: Overview
Message Categories: Overview & Use Cases
Phone Number Types: Overview and Use Cases
Email Variables & Conditions
Communication Tools: Overview
Trigger Explanations
Companies
How to: Setting Up a Company in Sonar
Managing Multiple Companies in Sonar: Best Practices
Rebranding your Sonar Instance
Financial
Contract Templates
Invoice Attachment Use Cases & PDF Examples
Invoice Messages: Overview & Use Cases
Invoices in Sonar: Examples, Creation & Contents
Integrations
Calix Integration: Overview
GPS Tracking Providers: Overview
Webhooks in Sonar: Basic PHP Example
How to Connect Cambium to your Sonar Instance
iCalendar Integration
RemoteWinBox - Integration with Sonar
External Marketing Providers
The Sonar Field Tech App
How to Connect Preseem to your Sonar System
Tower Coverage Integration: Overview
GoCardless Integration: Overview & Setup
Vetro FiberMap Integration: Overview
How to: Using Webhooks in Sonar
CrowdFiber Integration
Inventory
Setup of Inventory: Manufacturers, Categories, and Assignees
Inventory List View: Overview
Inventory Model Management: General Overview
Tracking and Using Consumable Inventory
Jobs
Job Types: Best Practices
Setting Up Schedules General Overview
Applying Task Templates to Jobs
Scheduling Week View: Overview
Example Jobs & Templates
Scheduling How-to: Creating and Booking a Job
Geofences: Overview
Edit Job Options
Jobs and Scheduling: Overview
Mapping
Misc.
Monitoring
Building a Monitoring Template
Pollers: General Overview, Deployment Strategy, Build Out & Setup
Building Alerting Rotations
Poller Troubleshooting
Networking
IP Assignments & Sonar
MikroTik: Setting Up a Sonar Controlled DHCP Server
IPAM: Basic Setup
MikroTik as an Inline Device: Integration With Sonar
MikroTik: Controlling Speeds
MikroTik: Controlling Access
PacketLogic: Integration With Sonar
Setting Up CoA Proxy
RADIUS: Building Reply Attributes
Data Usage Available Methods
Pulse, Polling, and PHP
Using Multiple Network Devices in Sonar
IPAM: Overview
Cable Modem Provisioning
LTE Integration
Assigning RADIUS Addresses
Controlling Customer Speeds with Sonar: General Overview
Sonar Flow
RADIUS: Build-Out & Integration with Sonar
Network Dashboard: Overview
Being Cloud Native
Netflow Integration: Overview
Building a Device Mapper
Sonar IP Addressing
Automating IP Assignments, Data Rates, and Network Access in Sonar
DHCP Delivery
Assigning an IP Address Using Sonar's IPAM: How to
Network Sites: Management View Overview
Building RADIUS Groups
Building Address Lists
Finding your OIDs
Purchase Orders
Release Notes
Reporting
Understanding Sonar Reports
How To Enhance Your Reporting With Custom Field Data
Report Licenses
Enhanced Business Intelligence - Tips & Tricks for Advanced Users
Sonar's Business Intelligence: Overview
Security
User Role Creation & Best Practices
Removing a Terminated Employee In Sonar
Password Policy In Depth
Application Firewall: General Overview and Best Practices
Users: Overview
Role Creation using GraphiQL
Sonar Billing
sonarPay
System
How to Best Use Global Search
How Your Data is Backed Up
How To Use GraphiQL to Understand the Sonar API
Frequently Used Terms
Sonar's Rich Text Editor
Mutations in the Sonar API
Notification Preferences
API Calls Using Third Party Applications: Personal Access Tokens
Date/Time Picker: Overview
Auth0: Overview
The New Sonar API
Introducing the New Sidebar
Upgrading your Ubuntu OS - Customer Portal Upgrades
A Deeper Dive into the New Sonar API
Consuming the Sonar API
Filtering: Simple vs Advanced
Browser Compatibility and Minimum Hardware Requirements for Sonar
REST API Wrappers for V1 Compatibility
User Profile: Your Personal User Settings
SMS Notifications
Dynamic Time Zones in Sonar
System Settings: Overview
Troubleshooting the Customer Portal
Controlling Your Landing Page: Personal Preferences
Interacting with Files via the API
Getting Your Data into Sonar
Customizing Your Customer Portal
Ticketing
Ticketing: Overview
Canned Replies Examples & Templates
Canned Reply Categories
Inbound Mailboxes Example Build
Ticket Categories Best Practices & Example Build
Exploring Ticket Groups
Using Parent Tickets
How to Integrate Inbound Mailboxes with Slack
Advanced Ticketing Features
Voice
Working With the Sonar Team & Additional Resources
Sonar's Security Practices & Certifications
Sonar and General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)
Technical Security Overview
CyberSecure Canada Certification
Sonar's Security Strategies
Best Practices for Fast Tracking a Support Request
How Sonar Bills Your Instance
The Sonar Status Page
The Sonar Community Forum
Feedback Portal / Suggest a Feature
Sonar Casts Table of Contents
How to Request Termination of your Sonar Instance
Submitting Bugs vs. Feature Requests
Third Party Customer Support Referrals
Client Services Training Overview
Learning with Sonar: Tools and Resources
Table of Contents
- All Categories
- Reporting
- Enhanced Business Intelligence - Tips & Tricks for Advanced Users
Enhanced Business Intelligence - Tips & Tricks for Advanced Users
Updated
by Mitchell Paul-Soumis
Read Time: 3 mins
Business Intelligence is more than your basic reports. In other articles, the Reports dashboard was shown, with the variety of default reports available to all subscribers detailed there. From there, Custom Reports were explored, with their general creation process detailed within that article. In this article, advanced features will be explored, aiming to provide you with ways to maximize your reporting.
Saving Edits to Reports
Whenever you modify a report, whether to update custom fields or add new fields, these changes need to be saved to the correct folder in your instance. For Personal (unpublished) reports, these folders, titled “accounts” and “financials”, need to be used when saving new dashboards.

If the customized report is saved anywhere outside either of these folders, it won't appear on the Reports dashboard. This includes the root directory, or having these two folders contained within subfolders.

The created reports don't need to have any data created, but they will appear in your list until filled in or removed. This process only needs to be performed once - the folders will persist even if the generated reports are removed.
Using Custom Filters
Sonar's Reporting system offers a series of preset filters to help organize and categorize your data. However, these filters may not satisfy all use cases. To account for that, Sonar's Business Intelligence dashboard offers the ability to create Custom Filters using an expression editor. The editor allows you to create flexible logic filters using AND/OR/NOT
and any comparison indicators (</>/=/etc.
). Custom filters allow you to combine multiple filters when either alone would be insufficient.
Creating a custom filter is done through an Explore. From any Explore, expand the filters menu, then check the “Custom Filter” box. This will add a new filter at the bottom of the list, where you can enter your custom expression and measures within them.

Using custom filters can be complicated. For this reason, we recommend reviewing the in-depth Looker documentation on using custom filters, available here. For more information on using custom expressions, refer to this additional piece of Looker documentation. Especially important is the "Seeing all selections" section of this document, due to the potential size of Sonar BI Explores.
Customizing Your Data Export
Getting your report data out of Sonar is one half of a whole process. Being able to use your report data with other applications is the other half. While Sonar's BI Reporting does tend to follow fairly transparent naming, this doesn't mean that all headers will automatically be compatible with all applications. For this reason, Sonar's reporting module supports customizable headers during table exploration. This allows you to modify headers, and save a customized dashboard with values that your other resources are expecting, without changing the data.
- From any Report Explore, click on the “Edit” button, followed by the “Series” tab:
- Expand the dropdown for the header that needs to be changed within the “Customization” section, then enter your desired header name:
The header changes will take effect immediately, and the newly customized Look can be saved to the dashboard of your choosing, ready for export.