Spotfire Ideas Portal
Spotfire 14.5 makes it easier to optimize data intensive business processes through enhanced automation and industry specific analytic capabilities. With this release, customers can benefit from continous innovation through new add-on capabilities without needing to upgrade to a new Spotfire version. Spotfire 14.5 also makes it easier for Administrators to optimize the performance of the Spotfire systems itself through stronger notification and monitoring capabilities of the Spotfire platform. Engineers in Oil and Gas will benefit from energy specific visualization and analytics capabilites such as the well log, 3D surface and line chart, well spacing and well bore diagram.
The new features in Spotfire Analytics include improved geoanalytics, broadened support for OAuth2 for accessing data and general usability improvements. For customers using the old Spotfire license model, these features are also available for users of Spotfire Analyst.
Spotfire 14.5 continues to advance the new visualization authoring experience, delivering a broad set of enhancements that improve flexibility, usability, and consistency across visualizations. This release introduces new customization options and layout controls for commonly used visualizations, and marks continued progress toward a unified authoring experience across both the web and installed clients.
Notable improvements in this release include:
Expanded appearance settings for visualizations such as box plots, graphical tables, KPI charts, and map charts.
New formatting and configuration options common across visualizations, including color, size, tooltip, connector lines, and formatting.
Enhanced interactivity and data display features, such as error bars and totals in cross tables and grouping in KPI charts.
Continued improvements to the map chart experience, including configuration of base layers, zoom behavior, and appearance.
The new visualization properties panel makes visualization authoring easier, more efficient, and unifies the experience in the web client and the installed client. It is:
Easy to use: All properties follow a consistent design across all visualization types. The panel only shows properties that are applied to the selected visualizations. Users simply add more properties to enrich visualizations.
Searchable: Users can quickly search to find properties and settings to edit or add.
Efficient: Users can configure multiple selected visualizations simultaneously and reuse configurations across visualizations through drag and drop.
Scalable: The panel is designed for scale and will support the addition of more visualization capabilities in future releases.
The new visualization properties panel is available to all users to explore in both the web client and the installed client. Not all visualizations properties and functionalities are available yet. The classic properties dialog remains available, and is still the default for configuring visualizations, and can be used in parallel while this new experience evolves.
Custom marker symbols, enables company or industry-specific customization of data points represented as markers in map visualizations and scatter plots. With this feature, analysts and engineers can:
Import custom symbols in formats like JPG, PNG, or SVG, tailored to industry-specific needs such as icons for equipment, materials, or scientific markers.
Fine-tune anchor positions for precise visualization, whether tracking drilling rigs on maps or comparing machine performance in scatter plots.
Dynamically adjust markers colors and sizes based on data being analyzed for context-rich visualizations.
Build and share reusable collections of symbols to maintain consistent visual standards across teams and analyses.
This capability is especially impactful in sectors like manufacturing and energy, where standardized machine icons, process symbols, or custom markers for assets streamline data interpretation and foster collaboration, making data comparison more intuitive.
Box plots now support multiple Y-axis scales, making it easier to compare distributions across different categories. Now, each trellis panel can scale independently, adapting automatically to the data it contains.
This enhancement ensures that box plots remain clear and informative, even when working with datasets that vary significantly in scale. Simply enable Multiple Scales in the Y-axis properties, and Spotfire will optimize the visualization for you.
Spotfire 14.5 adds support for OAuth2 when authenticating towards some common data sources.
The Snowflake connector has a modernized user experience that enables users to create and modify connections to Snowflake data sources in a consistent way across the desktop and web client. The connector now supports single sign on to provide a secure and personalized login using any OAuth 2.0 identity provider. There are also new custom connection properties that allow users to define data source or driver specific settings for greater customization of connection behavior and performance.
The Oracle connector is now available from the web client, enabling users to create and modify connections to Oracle data sources without needing to install the desktop client. To comply with modern security standards, connections can be configured with OAuth 2.0 identity providers for authenticating and authorizing users. There is native support for various new SQL functions such as CONCAT, LASTDAY, NEXTDAY, MONTHS_BETWEEN, and ADD_MONTHS as well as support for the XMLType data type.
Additionally, the connector for Oracle now supports custom connection properties for data source or driver specific settings. This allows for customizations, such as tweaking the connection performance, changing the behavior of a connection, or accessing certain data. The Oracle driver also ships with the product so the connector is ready to use out-of-the-box.
We're introducing support for OAuth authentication for WMS layers, making it easier than ever to integrate web map services into map chart visualizations.. With this enhancement, analysts can:
Authenticate with OAuth2/OIDC directly to a WMS service.
Browse and select available maps from a WMS provider.
Seamlessly add authenticated layers to map chart visualizations.
This update extends Spotfire's long-standing support for WMS by enabling secure access to modern web map services.
The Cloudera Impala connector is now available from the web client, enabling users to create and modify connections to Cloudera Impala data sources without needing to install the desktop client. Additionally, the connector for Cloudera Impala now supports custom connection properties for data source or driver specific settings. This allows for customizations, such as tweaking the connection performance, changing the behavior of a connection, or accessing certain data.
The desktop connectors now support various new prompting techniques that provide greater flexibility in the construction of queries:
Multiple Values: Support for multiple values prompting in connectors with manual input or pre-loaded values; manual input improves use cases in prompts where pre-loading the distinct list of values for selection can be costly or slow.
Prompt Groups: Introduction of prompt groups in connectors to group prompts into unique groups that are treated independently of each other. This means that prompt selections in one group will not affect the selections made available in a different prompt group.
Optional Prompts: Prompts can be configured as optional or required; optional prompts can be skipped without any user input, allowing users to interactively define their queries using only the relevant parameters.
The Google Big Query connector can now access data hosted in private Google Cloud environments. Users will have the option to configure the base URI and endpoint in the settings for data connections to BigQuery.
Administrators can now pin custom data sources to the Files and data flyout with a new preference setting called "Custom data source locations." This setting provides the option to pin a custom data source directly on the top level of the flyout or create a folder on the top level of the flyout to group data sources together. By default, custom data sources will be available in the Other category. Additionally, custom data sources will now be more easily findable using the Files and data flyout search bar.
Spotfire can now read data from Parquet files, as well as write data to Parquet files. The current implementation primarily supports reading from and writing to Parquet files in local storage. Parquet data types are mapped to supported data types in Spotfire.
The Essbase connector is now compatible with version 21, the latest release from Oracle.
Spotfire Data Science is a new product intended for engineers, scientists and other subject matter experts in industries where its required to use complex data to make important business decisions.
In version 14.5 Spotfire Data Science includes Energy and Manufacturing specific analytics, time series preparation and missing data analysis capabilites, and also the ability to add new Data Science add-ons during the lifetime of Spotfire 14.5.
The well log is a specialized visualization for analysing physical, chemical and electrical properties of rock and fluid mixtures over depth, alongside a view of the geology. It's often used in oil and gas in order to identify pay zones, evaluate formation properties such as porosity and permeability to plan completions activities in order to optimize reservoir production or estimate reserves.
The Well Log arranges the measurements in a way that is familiar and expected by Oil and Gas engineers, and they can compare the measurements alongside the geology track –which uses industry standard textures representing the geology type at the given depths.
The Well log supports tagging of multiple depth regions to highligt interesting intervals.
The 3D surface and line chart is used to visualize wells and formations, and is typically used to evaluate production and plan additional drilling to optimize the production.
The 3D Surface and Line chart makes it easy to visualize the geometry of the wells, including the perforations of the well that are made to let the fluid seep into the well.
The well spacing, or as its popularly called in the industry, Gun barrel diagram, is used for analysing the spacing between wells, which is useful in order to evaluate if additional drilling of wells will help to improve production.
The well spacing diagram visualizes horizontal sections of the well. The filled circles are the wells, as they are spaced at a specific intersection when looking at them along their drilling direction, so think of it like looking into a pipe from one of its ends.
The lines you see going left and right across the visualization are representations of rock formation tops, thus indicating the top of geological layers.
This visualization provides locations of existing well locations and formation tops. Interactive features allow the engineer to determine precise distances between well locations.
The wellbore diagram visualizes a single wellbore and its most important completions components such as the casing diameter, "guns", perforations and plugs.
It is often used for diagnosing issues with production in the well, and visualizes measurements taken by diagnostic equipment at various positions of the well such as concentrations or temperatures.
The Wellbore diagrams helps Production Engineers, Drilling Engineers and well completions engineers with their job, such as deciding what corrective actions they want to take, or if they need additional diagnostic operations before deciding what to do.
Spotfire’s map charts are extremely flexible and versatile, and are used to create wafer maps. However creating a wafermap using a map chart is non-trivial since it requires quite elaborate configuration of the mapchart.
The Create Wafer Map action mod helps engineers in semiconductor manufacturing quicker and easier create and use a wafer map for analysing the spatial distribution of defects, electrical measurments or other parameters on the wafer.
Wafer zone analysis is used to Identify spatial patterns that can be correlated with process patterns and yield. This Action supports both radial and angular zones.
Time series analysis is common in most industries, for example finance, utilities and of course also in manufacturing and energy.
Spotfire 14.5 provides time series preprocessing data functions and actions including
-Normalize time series (action) - allows individual series to be normalized to a common scale so they can be more accurately compared
-Handle time series missing values (action) - Imputes data for any missing values within a time series using summary statistics, nearest or previous value, linear interpolation or a constant value.
-Time series resampling (data function) - Increase or decrease the frequency of time intervals for a given series. The resulting series will be regular and equally distanced.
-Time series smoothing (data function and action) - Reduces noise in time series data caused by outlying values to easily see the underlying trends.
Missing data is a thing for almost anyone that uses data for analytics.
The missing data action reveals missing data patterns across rows or columns which may give insights related to column or row removal decisions, and also makes it easy to identify invariant columns (columns with just one value).
In Spotfire 14.5 there are a number of data functions built in out of the box. These data functions are implementing capabilites related to Time Series preparation, Geo Analytics and Missing data analysis. These built-in data functions are accessible and configurable to Spotfire Data Sicence users, but can be executed by any user with the right to execute data functions.
Convert geological survey data into the correct coordinate reference system (CRS) for accurate well positioning.
Use geodesic distance calculations to determine pipeline feasibility and access road placement.
Distance calculations provide adjustable accuracy for speed vs. precision trade-offs.
Polygon areas can be precisely calculated for land use assessment.
Compare time-dependent or depth-dependent sequences (e.g. well logs) to identify similar geological formations or reservoir characteristics.
Evaluate similarity with multiple metrics, including standard and scaled distance, variability indicators, and outlier detection, for deeper insights.
Identify the wells most geologically similar to a reference well, streamlining exploration and development decisions.
Uncover hidden patterns in well logs and other sequence data, enabling faster, data-driven decisions in exploration and development.
Automatically handle missing data, with optional normalization, smoothing, and detrending for enhanced analysis where needed.
Control over level of output detail such as paths and path lengths
Smoothing makes trends and outlying values easier to see and understand
Choose smoothing methods: Friedman’s supersmoother, LOESS, Exponential and choose smoothing levels
Resampling ensures evenly spaced time or depth series
Adjust series frequencies to desired granularity.
Choose from a variety of fill methods to upsample or aggregation methods to downsample
High level summary of missing values across the entire data table.
Number and percentage of missing values in each column or row, and ratio of missing values across multiple columns or rows
Insights enable what-if scenarios to determine impact on removing missing data
Apart from the capabilites available in Spotfire Data Science in the Spotfire 14.5 release, Spotfire Data Science let's users access Data Science add-ons that are plugin visualizations and actions implementing solutions to industry specific use cases. Such add-ons can be added after the release of Spotfire 14.5, during its supported lifetime. This makes it possible to continously benefit from innovation and add new capabilites to Spotfire 14.5, without upgrading the entire Spotfire system.
For administrators It is now easier than ever to manage your Spotfire Licenses.
The new license management UI in the Spotfire server make it easy to assign the desired product license for each user group. No fiddling around with multiple choices of license features, just select the product license you want the user group to have.
When you have selected a product license for the group, you can, if you want, disable some of the features that are part of the product license, but you are not able to accidentally add features that belong to another product.
The Spotfire Servers license UI even tells you how many users you have assigned to each product license, making it easier than ever to make sure you keep compliant with your contract.
With the new license management UI you can easily see how many product licenses you have assigned, both for the new and the old license models.
Old license model
New license model
Administrators can also configure a maximum value to be displayed alongside the number of assigned users. This makes it easier to ensure that you are utilizing your licenses fully and that you are compliant with your license agreement.
The administrator can easily create a deployment report by clicking the button in the About section of the web adminstration UI of the Spotfire Server.
The deployment report contains information about:
Assigned product licenses over time which makes it easy to verify that one is compliant with the license agreement.
Usage of Product licenses and licensed features over time which is helpful to monitor actual usage of the product licenses, see trends and patterns etc.
System information such as library usage and the number of instances and processors running each of the Spotfire Services to make it easy to verify that one is compliant with the license agreement.
The new Spotfire Deployment report summarizes the number of users that you have assigned licenses to, on a daily basis.
The Deployment report also includes the number of unique users that used a Specific product licenses in a given time period. This is intended as an indication of the utilization of the available product licenses.
In addition the report contains information about the usage of licensed features which is also an indication of the utilization of the product licenses.
The deployment report also collects information about the number of instances and processors that runs each Spotfire Service. This is for example useful for ensuring compliance with instance and processor based licensing agreements as well as an overview of the entire deployment.
The Library usage information in the deployment report provides a view of the assets governed in the Spotfire library as well as the activity such as creation and modification of such assets.
Spotfire administrators can now configure notification preferences for Automation Services jobs to send notifications that include the job result and status information.
You can configure email notifications by setting the email connection details, recipient lists, and the job statuses to be notified about (all, failed, or successful).
You can configure HTTP notifications by specifying the HTTP host authorization type (OAuth, basic, none), and the job statuses to be notified about (all, failed, or successful).
Spotfire administrators can now configure notification preferences for Scheduled Updates to send notifications that include the job result and status information.
You can configure email notifications by setting the email connection details, recipient lists, and the job statuses to be notified about (all, failed, or successful).
You can configure HTTP notifications by specifying the HTTP host, the authorization type (OAuth, basic, none), and the job statuses to be notified about (all, failed, or successful).
The delete-library-items command now supports providing a search query for items that should be deleted.
The delete-library-items command now supports prompting for confirmation when deleting non-empty folders or items on which other items have dependencies. The command also has two new arguments: --allow-unresolved-dependencies and --no-prompt.
A new CLI command, restore-previous-version, has been added which lets you restore a previous version of a library item.
There are new menus in the Admin UI to view Information Services deployment details across Spotfire servers. It allows admins to start, stop and restart Information Services' processes with support for scheduled shutdowns. There is also a View Diagnostics shortcut to open the relevant logs for the selected IS process.
There is also a new Admin UI menu to monitor the execution status of running or recently executed Information Link jobs. This allows admins to view the performance of running jobs and cancel jobs that are hanging.
Added the new setting max-restarts to the CLI command config-external-information-services-process.
With this setting, you can configure the maximum number of times to attempt to restart the Information Services process after it closes unexpectedly.
A new CLI command, list-datasources, has been added. It lets you find and list the Information Services data sources in the Spotfire library.
The list-obsolete-licenses and the delete-obsolete-licenses CLI commands can be used to list and delete obsolete licenses from the server. "Obsolete" in this case means that no deployed package is referencing the license features.
Note that in some scenarios, older clients might still rely on these obsolete licenses. If licenses are prematurely removed, they can be added again by re-deploying older versions of the packages from where these licenses originated. Also note that the licenses might need to be re-assigned to user groups.
The Spotfire Server com.spotfire.server.security.CustomAuthenticator interface includes now support for access tokens that adheres to the JSON Web Token (JWT) Profile for OAuth 2.0 Access Tokens (RFC 9068) format.
This means that this interface now has out-of-the-box support for authenticating users using JWT-based access tokens.
The Spotfire Server can now be configured to allow an external Authorization Server to authorize clients to use the Spotfire Server APIs, through the use of the Token Exchange grant.
The RFC 8693 OAuth 2.0 Token Exchange extension defines a mechanism for a client to obtain its own tokens given a separate set of tokens. This has several different applications including:
Single-sign-on between multiple mobile apps without launching a web browser
A resource server exchanging a client's tokens for its own tokens
Ubuntu 24.04 LTS is now supported as the operating system for:
Spotfire Server
Spotfire Web Player
Spotfire Automation Services
Spotfire Enterprise Runtime for R - Server Edition (a/k/a the TERR™ service)
Spotfire Service for Python
Spotfire Service for R
Eclipse Temurin Java Development Kit 21 LTS is now supported for Spotfire Server.
Eclipse Temurin is the open source Java SE build based upon OpenJDK. Eclipse Temurin 21 LTS is embedded in the Spotfire Server and node manager installation packages.
Note: Oracle Java SE Development Kit 17 LTS is no longer supported.
Microsoft .NET 8 is now supported for:
Spotfire Web Player
Spotfire Automation Services
.NET 8 is the latest LTS release and it was released on November 2023.
Note: This applies to the Spotfire Web Player and the Spotfire Automation Services service when running on Linux.
Note: The support for .NET 6 has now been removed.
Skia is now the only supported graphics backend when running Spotfire on Linux.
Note: The System.Drawing.Common library is only supported when running Spotfire on Windows for .NET 8 and onwards.
In previous versions, the prerequisites scripts needed when running the Web Player or Automation Services on Linux were included together with the Spotfire.Dxp.netcore-linux.sdn distribution, but they did not become available until after you had tried to create a service.
From Spotfire 14.5 and forward, the prerequisites scripts are instead delivered together with the installation software on eDelivery, SPOT_sfire_deploy_version.zip. The instructions have been updated on Running Web Player or Automation Services on Linux.
Spotfire 14.5 introduces significant enhancements to the action mods framework, unlocking more diverse and complex use cases:
It is now possible to add and configure a data function instance (including builtin data functions) from an action mod. This means that, from the same action, visualizations can be automatically created to show the outputs from a data function, and that additional operations can be added before or after the data function call.
The API now allows for creating, configuring and accessing visualization mods in the same way as native visualizations.
Each action in an action mod now has a separate icon, which makes it easier to identify the actions in the Actions flyout as well as on action triggers, such as floating buttons and title bar buttons, in visualizations.
The search feature in the Actions flyout now also includes individual actions within an action mod.
The range of input types for actions has been extended with more options in the manifest. Running an action with a data column input parameter will expose the user with a searchable point-and-click user interface to select a data column, or a list of data columns from a specified data table. Data view inputs allows the user to combine data column selections and data limitations from markings and filterings. With enum inputs, the user can make a selection from a drop-down list with options defined by the mod developer.
Input parameters can now be declared as optional, which makes action configuration more flexible and efficient.
An action mod can now include embedded resources, such as image files or data files, that can be used by the script code and added to the analysis via the API.
Images can now be embedded as resources in an action mod and, through the API, be added to text areas or as image layers in map charts.
An action mod can now add binary data columns to an analysis, either from files embedded as mod resources or generated from script code.
A number of enhancements are available for visualization mods, including the following:
Visualization mods can now be defined with fixed axis expressions using heuristics specified in the mod manifest. This allows mod developers to ensure that a specific expression, such as Count(), is always used on a designated axis.
It is now possible to specify that the initial expression on a continuous axis should be non-aggregating.
Visualization mods now support undo/redo for all configuration changes, which provides a more intuitive experience, consistent with native visualizations.
You can now browse for, and save, local .mod files also when using the Spotfire web client.
The visualization mods API has been extended with more information describing the visual theme used in Spotfire, allowing zoom sliders and trellis panel headers to follow the current visual theme.
The visualization mods API now supports more efficiently adaptations to updates caused by streaming data.
An API has been added for managing visualization mods in the analysis.
This includes the option to load mods from the library, as well as the possibility to add and modify mod instances. This API is available in C# extensions, action mods and IronPython scripts.
Clients using the Spotfire JavaScript API to embed Spotfire can now provide a completely seamless authentication experience through the use of tokens issued by an external Authorization Server.
The Spotfire JavaScript API now fully supports TypeScript. This makes development faster and more efficient, with intelligent code completion and helpful error checking right within Visual Studio Code.
The API documentation has been completely overhauled into a single, easy-tonavigate resource with comprehensive overview, a clear getting started guide, and detailed API references.