Creating an effective business dashboard
EXPANSO
Expanso is a distributed platform offering for commercial and enterprise solutions. It is a company in the web2.0 space that provides managed services on top of the open-source Bacalhau project.
Bacalhau is a platform that aims to revolutionise the way cloud data is used by allowing users to remotely run processes on datasets stored in the cloud, allowing for extra efficiency and security in the use of cloud data. It’s a product designed for fast, cost efficient and secure computation that enables users to run compute jobs where the data is generated and stored.
The challenge
Expanso is a growing company with new users taking up their services and tools each day. With the services they provide, users can transform data processing for large-scale datasets and open large data processing capabilities to a wider audience. However, as a business they need to keep track of their customers and how they are engaging with and using each of their tools. They needed a comprehensive business dashboard that they could turn to and rely on for accurate reporting.
This business dashboard would need to utilise data from multiple data sources and turn it into easy to understand data metrics and visualisations. Information the dashboard would need to provide included:
Number of unique users on the public network
Number of jobs run on the network over time
Jobs by types (i.e. Docker vs Wasm, GPU vs non-GPU)
Github interactions, including downloads, stars and contributors
Website traffic
Then over time the dashboard would need to be able to evolve and include further metrics such as those from social media, and all the processes would need to be able to accommodate these changes.
What we did
Register Dynamics were asked to scope out and identify the best solution for Expanso’s business dashboard. We considered all of the available options and chose Google’s Looker Studio (formerly Data Studio) as the best suited platform for Expanso’s specific needs.
Bacalhau’s job data is one of the most important data sets to include in the dashboard and was stored in PostgreSQL (a powerful open source object-relational database system). As such, integration with PostgreSQL was vital as was having easy-to-use built-in connectors to Google Analytics (for reporting on website traffic) and Google Sheets, which was important for monitoring the GitHub (an open community where people build software) metrics.
We liaised with all of the key stakeholders involved as we setup all of the necessary data connections to the dashboard and developed the data metrics within it, to ensure that the business dashboard was meeting their requirements. We would update and tweak the dashboard and how it was set up based on feedback and requirements as they came in.
We also set up Apps Scripts (which enable you to customise menus, dialogs and sidebars) within Google Sheets to automatically track and record the data on GitHub interactions, from which it could easily be incorporated into the Looker Studio dashboard.
As the requirements of the project evolved, we needed to pull in social media data from LinkedIn, Twitter, Slack and Substack. Given that Looker Studio has no built-in process to connect to these services, it presented a slight challenge and we presented 2 options to Expanso - either pay for third party Looker Studio services to connect to these apps, or set up a manual process. Given that the client did not require the social media data to be constantly up to date, they opted for the manual process which we set up for them along with instructions on how to update it, and incorporate the social media metrics into the existing dashboard.
The result
Expanso now has a reliable and comprehensive Business Dashboard that they use for monitoring and reporting on the success of their Bacalhau platform. They are able to keep track of their customers’ activities and draw valuable insights from the data, enabling them to build on their successes and continue to grow as a business.
We provided them with comprehensive documentation on how to use and maintain the dashboard and continued to liaise with them after the product was finished in order to ensure that they could maintain it themselves.
We are delighted that the Business Dashboard is being used regularly and that it helps to drive data-informed decisions.
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