Create Related Metrics

You can establish a hierarchy within the metrics in your workspace either with calculation or without calculation.

Related metrics show a hierarchy without using any calculations—each metric stands on its own. This is helpful when your metrics are already calculated elsewhere, like in a spreadsheet or you want to display metrics that have a relationship but not mathematically connected. In this case, you can create a new metric that’s related to others, but doesn’t perform any additional calculation. Since the values are already calculated at the source, there's no roll-up of progress from child to parent metrics.

For example, you can link metrics which have different units such as currencies, people, hours, etc., to get the whole picture of a Sales team and their different metrics. Or, while setting up a tree with leading and lagging indicators for a top level metric just for visual representation as they don’t have the same units and don’t need aggregation of data.

In Create Aggregated Metrics with Metrics Calculations, you'll learn how to create metric trees with calculations like addition and average between the connected or manual metrics. In the aggregated metric, the progress is rolled up to the parent metric from its child metrics.

Creating a Related Metric Tree

You can build a metric tree by either creating manual metrics or using existing connected metrics (from an integration).
1. If the integrated metric is not yet connected in Cascade: From the Metrics > Library > + Create new metric > Connect to a source or Metrics > Connect metrics tab, choose the source in which your data is available.
2. Establish the connection and follow the steps to import the relevant metrics into the Metrics library. See Google Sheets, Microsoft Excel to know how to import metrics from these sources into Cascade.
Click Metric trees. Drag and drop the relevant metrics from the left pane or click + Create new metric > Manual to create a manual metric (Do NOT select calculated)
Connect the metric tiles and choose Related option.
Click Preview to view the hierarchy of those metrics.
Click Save. Now the metrics are linked, but no calculation will be performed to roll up the progress.

Metric trees only appear in the Metric Library unless they’re connected to a measure in a plan. To add this hierarchy within a plan, use submeasures. Learn more in Connecting Metric Trees to Measures for Submeasures

Click the parent metric in the hierarchy to view or edit the related metrics from its Metric Tree tab.

The icons detail:

Whether the metric is connected, calculated or manual. This icon here says that the metric is connected to a source.
The trend of the metric - higher or lower
Number of child metrics under it. In this case, it says there're 2 child metrics under it.
Number of measures connected to that metric. Here, it shows 0 as there're no measures connected to the metric.

You can also edit the metric tree to add or remove any child metrics.

You can edit or delete a metric either from the Metric tree tab of its sidebar or from the Metric trees page.

Click the metric and from its Metric tree tab, click Edit metric tree.

Select the check-boxes of the metrics that you need to remove from the relationship and click Remove selected.
Or, click the Trash icon against the relevant metrics and remove them.
If there're also calculations in the metric tree, you can choose to change the option to Sum, Average or Related from the operator dropdown.
Click Add metric and choose the metrics that you wish to add.
Click View metric tree to revert or click Save to see your changes reflected.

Or, click View full metric tree. This'll open up the metric in the Metric trees page.

Click on the metric tile that you wish to remove, and click the Trash icon.
If there're also calculations in the metric tree, you can choose to change the option to Sum, Average or Related from the operator dropdown.
To add a new metric to the existing tree, drag and drop the metrics from the left pane and assign the relevant relation to it.
Click Preview and then Save to see your changes reflected.

As and when the value of the child metrics changes, the metric tree is updated with the values automatically.