Dashboards

• Dashboards come in many flavours.

• Chosing the right (combination of) frameworks has an impact on possibilites and limitations.

• Free vs paid framework:

  • Free is usually only free in the development phase.

  • Some paid services also include deployment on a server, easy scaling to meet demands, etc.

  • For companies with custom built projects, infrastructure may already be available in-house or through a contract with Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform or other agreements.

• No code vs only code vs hybrid

• Static vs streaming data:

  • Is the data collected in advance or will more data arrive after deployment?

• Static vs interactive interface:

  • Hovering or clicking to reveal labels; zooming, paning, etc.

  • Selection of subsets, possibly affecting other plots.

  • Graphical user interface elements (widgets like buttons, sliders, etc.) to manipulate plots.

  • Possiblity of selecting input data.

• Single or multiple views:

  • Static set of plots.

  • Card layout with “layers” of dashboards.

  • Connected pages with different focus, e.g.,

    • (1) data selection and filtering, (2) plots, (3) key performance indexes.

Dashboard frameworks¶

• There are dozens of different frameworks available, both open and proprietary.

• Power BI:

  • Microsoft’s industry standard for dashboard building.

  • Visual app building with possibility of integrating code.

  • Various tiers from limited free to full blown enterprise.

• Grafana:

  • Open source ecosystem with additional paid services.

  • Strong on profiling, metrics, sensor integration, etc.

• Tableau

  • Subscription full stack of data handling to visualisation.

• Dash

  • Dashboards of all kinds based on open source Plotly.

• Excel:

  • For static data and static plots, Excel has lots of options.

• Jupyter:

  • Many of the elements of a dashboard can be integrated into a Jupyter Notebook.

  • Services exist that can turn Python Notebooks into web apps (e.g., Mercury).

• Streamlit:

  • Pages of Python based widget and graphics.

  • Extension modules.

  • Deployment webpage with single free (limited) app, then payment subscription.

    • Connected to GitHub, so every git push updates the app.

• Writer Framework:

  • Previously Streamsync.

  • Drag-and-drop visual editor with Python backend and event handling.

  • Extension modules.

  • Various widgets, metrics, interactive Plotly graphics, multiple pages and card layout.

  • Asynchronus (non-blocking), threaded, minimal latency.

  • Can be deployed via Docker, though free services are few and far appart.