Procedure - Business dashboards with Pentaho PDI and Geckoboard

In this post we will describe a low-cost, fast and efficient alternative to Enterprise dashboards.

This alternative is based on the use of the cloud platform Geckoboard.

If we look what used to be the dashboards solutions for companies, although there will be many more cases or situations, we normally find these:

• Implementation of complete BA (business analytics) systems that cover all the needs we may require (etl, reporting, analytics, dashboards, mining, kpis, ...), but we do not really enjoy the full potential, far exceed the requirements since the final objective is to have only some panels for operations, administration, etc.
• Ad-hoc programmatic solutions, usually in dashboard-specific web applications or integrated into main applications, in this case, perfectly meets the objective of having only what interests (dashboards), but at a fairly high cost.
• Individual installations of specific products for generating statistics and dashboards, usually low-cost desktop tools, here the problem is usually that we are not talking about a business solution, but rather a tool for limited use and that may require certain knowledge or training to be used by users.

...

In short, many scenarios and possibilities.

At Sepalo we work and encourage the use of the cloud for both infrastructure and for specific services.

With a customer who is only interested in business dashboards, we opted to outsource the service to platforms such as Geckoboard, which has many advantages, among which we can highlight:

• Reduced usage costs, (sorry, it isn´t open source)
• Generation of dashboards via web, quickly and easily
• Web visualization for the whole company and on any device

How about security?

In the implementations that we are carrying out, what we do is publish the data in geckoboard, that is, we do not have to open our systems to be accessed by geckoboard, we are the ones who send the information to geckoboard.

Publishing data in geckoboard?

Yes, there are several methods, it could be done in an integrated way in the applications, through the apis provided by geckoboard, but we have separated and isolated these publishing processes through specific ETL processes that are responsible for collecting the information and publishing it in geckoboard.

ETLs for publishing web information?

Yes, although it usually comes to mind that an ETL process is only in charge of moving data from one database to another, or perhaps uploading / downloading information to databases through files, current data integration systems can do a lot more, in fact, many times we try to develop in the applications complex functionalities that are already present in ETL systems, so it would be a good idea to know the capabilities of these systems to avoid unnecessary development costs.

Ok, after the speech, yes, in Sepalo we are using with a lot of acceptance data integration processes based on Pentaho PDI (open source), specifically for the publication of data in geckoboard through its apis.

Having this process separately and parameterized, allows us greater control and versatility, thus, we can point the process to a database or another, quickly publish new data sets in geckoboard, change refresh intervals, etc.

We can see graphically the implementation of these processes of pentaho PDI in the following screenshots:

 

In addition, a simple architecture diagram of a dashboard solution with geckoboard in the following graph:

In short, a low cost, fast to deploy and efficient solution for business dashboards, basically, what was indicated at the beginning of the post ...

How much does it really cost?

Here we have to include the own costs of the use of the geckoboard platform, these prices can be checked in the geckoboard site pricing section, in addition it is necessary to add the costs of design / implantation of ETL processes for data publication, which will depend on the information to be published, the number of datasets, how parameterized or metadated that we want everything to be, etc. Besides, there is a small part that has to be taken into account and would be the final design of the dashboards from the published datasets.

The ideal and recommended is that for the tasks of design / implementation of ETL processes and for the design of the final dashboards contact a trusted supplier (Sepalo) who can estimate the work and offer a closed budget for such tasks.