@SMSMSM comparing the two can be tricky as they are two very different features - trying to think about Insights like a Report Definition may lead you to make the wrong conclusions. In my opinion, Explore Data and Insights is geared towards self-service, the business should be fully self sufficient on their reporting needs without the need to wait for developers to create them operational reports.
To go direct to your questions.
- Insights are sourced against the object itself (case or data), it does not use an activity, nor data transform to populate. These are sourced via a Virtual Report Definition based on the object setup (see Settings tab > Default Data sources). However, that datapage is not the true source of all information, there is more going on in the background than even I know about here - the datapage is just a starting point for this Virtual Report Definition to populate.
- Non-queryable data does work - however, that can only be accessed via an Author access group, via App Studio running of Explore Data (not an end user portal). You can source your datapages for an insight there > but i believe they can only be set to “Admin” access and not used by real users in Explore Data…
- It’s actually are really important point, App Studio running vs End User Portal running of Explore Data can result in different outcomes (due to access differences).
Right now, as of 24.2.2, Explore Data supports the following (Pegasystems Documentation)
- Queryable Data Pages
- Page.property
- Page.Page.property
- PageList.property
- Non-queryable Data Pages
- Page.property
- Page.Page.property
- PageList.property
- Page.PageList.property
- PageList.Page.property