Ask HN: What low-code “dashboarding“ SaaS would you recommend in 2021? I‘d like to aggregate the output of a few REST calls visually. What options do I have nowadays? Thanks! |
Ask HN: What low-code “dashboarding“ SaaS would you recommend in 2021? I‘d like to aggregate the output of a few REST calls visually. What options do I have nowadays? Thanks! |
- Rails Blazer gem (if you are using rails)
https://grafana.com/grafana/plugins/simpod-json-datasource
It has a great GUI for building queries, plus solid RBAC, great charting, and a very flexible alert system. Configure in their GUI, then get your dashboard's code in as JSON for deployment. You can also define dashboard in actual code, ie grafanalib in Python and others- which is great for DevOps. https://github.com/weaveworks/grafanalib
They have nice stylesheets ready for TV displays, but it gets really fun when users get their hands on it and can zoom in and drill down on time-series data, filter with dynamic parameters and such.
Creating dashboards is so freaking painful.
You do not need to use the hosted offering in that case.
The trouble with "low-code" is that you're stuck on rails - it's very easy to do a few things, but the moment you want something the creators didn't anticipate, prepare for a lot of pain.
Anvil is the opposite approach - it's a dev environment that happens to be simple enough to build a dashboard in minutes, but with a Real Damn Programming Language. It's basically Delphi for the web: It's got a drag-n-drop designer, Python in the browser and on the server, code editor with full-stack autocomplete, etc.
(And unlike "low-code" tools, the runtime engine is open source, so you're not locked in: https://github.com/anvil-works/anvil-runtime)
People still upgrade for editor features - eg we have several Business plan users who primarily deploy with the open-source App Server - but it's by no means required.
Ran into some limits one or two years ago when using it with Firestore and had to go with something else, but I can’t really blame it for having trouble dealing with relationships when using a non-relational database ^^’
If you're looking for high-level dashboarding/monitoring that connects directly with your sources (REST, 3rd-party apps like Facebook, Adwords, etc), then tools in the realm of Klipfolio, Databox, Grow.com will suit you well. If you're looking for visualization tools that connect to your data-warehouse/SQL database, then BI tools like Holistics, Metabase, Redash, etc will likely work for you. And of course there's tools that can support both kinds of sources, like PowerBI and Google Data Studio.
P/s: This post does a good job at laying down a framework for evaluating these sort of BI tools: https://www.holistics.io/books/setup-analytics/navigating-th...
A nondev should likely stick to the first group, which has a lot of integrations and the hardest coding will be around excel formulas at most
In my experience its best to do the following:
Have 1 dashboard specific to business finance and ads metrics. This dashboard includes klipfolio or simpler things like grow or fathom accounting.
Another tool connected to your bd, at the most basic starting with mode Analytics and then going full visual with looker or tableau (this is where things get expensive)
I work at Grow, happy to answer any questions.
aws cloudwatch put-metric-data
--metric-name registered_users
--namespace MySaaS
--value 241
You can also have multiple requests made to different services gathering data on the same chart.
Disclaimer: I'm the creator of the tool, so feel free to ask any questions about it and I'll be happy to answer
After researching available options for a while and consulting everyone I know in this field, I settled on building on top of the Plotly Javascript library:
https://plotly.com/javascript/
It does nice interactive charts out of the box. All you need to do is throw data at it.
What it lacks are more high level operations like:
- Interactively switch between different chart types (lines, scatter, box plots, bar charts etc)
- Aggregate time series by hour/day/month/week/year
- Extrapolate data to the rest of the current time period
So I built this functionality on top of Plotly and I am happy with the result.
It looks like over time I will turn this into a mix of data studio and jupyter notebooks. But it runs in the browser and is simple and blazingly fast.
https://plotly.com/javascript/aggregations/
Pretty cool!
It has nice gui for data exploration, clean charts and integrates really well with gsheets.
If you save the API calls in a database could use this?
https://github.com/appsmithorg/appsmith www.appsmith.com
It doesn't have the functionality to perform custom REST calls yet but it's definitely on the list. For now you can get the basic metrics from Google Analytics, Search Console, Facebook Pages, Instagram, and Stripe. It's still very much in beta but you're welcome to try it.
I use it for my dashboards. It's super simple to prototype apps and it's under rapid development.
It's meant to be a modern take on BI/Analytics, and sort of a blend between dashboards, scheduled reporting and notebook analytics (like Observable/Jupyter).
You can just drop in data files of any kind, syndicate data from your cloud drives, connect to remote databases, upload via the API, and it has 80k+ open datasets available for analysis and benchmarking.
It also has a full SQL database running in the browser, so if you build dynamic notebooks/dashboards with business logic, you can do really fast SQL without any network latencies.
Disclaimer: I'm the creator/founder of Rational BI.
Definitely on my watch list though!
It's great but it comes with a few drawbacks.
The UI for creating dashboards isn't the best, but it's really nice to be able to drop down to SQL so easily and share or embed results.
You need to set up a signing key on the backend, which is a good thing. Many dashboard sharing schemes end up being public or with very weak security.
I still use it (deployed it at my current company and the CEO loves h iui s dashboard). But I hate the way things are hidden in the current layout.
We didn't get in (this time), but we are about to launch a beta soon. If someone is interested please send me an email at <username>@gmail.com - Thanks
[0] - https://www.causal.app/
Anyone can use the graphical transforms to 'write' SQL and you can pull all the data into the provided data warehouse so don't have to set that up.
Is is not cheap, but it is powerful. I work there, happy to answer any questions.
It lets you define your dashboard logic in a spreadsheet & then drag/drop the dashboard UI and publish it for end-user consumption.
It’s modern, easy to extend. From the same author of apache airflow.
I've recently had good luck streaming stuff from python into InfluxDB 2.0 - and that has built in basic charting / dashboard. Not grafana level fancy, but not bad either
Have a great new year!