Insights Labs is a new beta program at Benchling for the Insights area. In order to get new charts types, chart customizations, and other UI upgrades in your hands as fast as possible, we've created this voluntary program.

New features will be added rapidly to this beta program and clearly labeled as beta. Most features added to Insights Labs will be available there for a few weeks or months before being broadly released. Keep in mind that though we will do our utmost to avoid it, features in this set may break, disappear, or change without warning. For more about what it means for features to be in beta, see our article that describes the Benchling release stages. 

Please keep in mind that an analysis or analysis template that is created with an Insights Labs feature may but is not guaranteed to work for a user who does not have Insights Labs enabled.

Getting Access

Your tenant administrator can enable access to "Insights Labs" by navigating to the Tenant admin console > Settings  > Insights. This can be enabled for specific users, all users. The default is disabled for all users.

Current Feature List

Analysis Left-Sidebar Improvements

Improvements to left-side bar options and UI:

• Deeper view nesting: allows for nesting of views with more than one level
   
• Search: easily find views within the sidebar with search
   
• Direct View Creation: create new views from any parent or child view in the sidebar
   
• Go to Flowchart: click to focus on a specific view in the Flowchart editor

Charting Capabilities

Improvements to chart types and configuration options: 

• Box Plot: A new chart type displaying the classic box plot visualization
   
• Color Picking: A color customization tool that gives you direct control over chart colors
   
• Point Styling: Allows you to select styling of points/markers, including customizing the opacity of points
   
• Custom Axis Labeling: Allows you to custom-define axis labels on charts
   
• Right Sidebar: New look and feel for the configuration sidebar
   
• Legend Settings: Hide the legend, change its position, or add a custom label

Note: Color picking, point styling, and custom axis labeling apply to all chart types except for regressions. 

Experiment Optimization 

Experiment Optimization is a powerful analysis tool that helps you understand and optimize your experiments. It's designed to solve complex, multi-dimensional problems where an outcome is affected by many interacting variables. For more information on how Experiment Optimization works, see the linked article. 

Note: To access this feature in beta you must have a license to either Advanced Analysis or Bioprocess. 

Create Tables from Direct SQL Queries in Analysis

You can now create tables in Analysis by writing a direct SQL query against the Benchling Warehouse. This gives you a flexible, code-first way to pull precisely the data you need into an Analysis without relying solely on dashboard blocks or registry imports.

What you can do:

•  In the Analysis Flowchart and select Add Source Step and select the Create Table from Direct SQL Query option to open a SQL editor.
• Write any valid SQL query against the Benchling Warehouse to define the table.
• The resulting table is created in your Analysis just like any other dataset, and can be used as input to downstream transforms, charts, and other steps.

Data limits:

• Up to 50,000 rows can be returned by a SQL query step — consistent with the existing "Create from dashboard block" and CSV export limits.

Current limitations:

• Features like a schema browser, adding parameters,  are planned for a future iteration.
• When an Analysis containing a SQL query step is saved as a template, the SQL table is treated as Static — the query does not automatically re-execute when the template is applied. Users will need to manually create or update the table when starting from a template.
• Queries are run against the Data Warehouse, so results reflect the most recently synced data rather than a live, real-time view.

Visual Flagging

Visual flagging tool allows you to use charts and graphs to identify and mark data points that appear to be significantly different from the rest of the data. This tool allows you to flag the unusual data points for further investigation or exclusion.

You can apply visual flagging to the following plots: 

• Regression

For more information on how to use the feature visit the Visual Flagging section of our Analyze Data with Benchling Analysis article.

Note: To access this feature in beta you must have a license to either Advanced Analysis or Bioprocess.