fabiochiu/medium-articles huggingface dataset:
Bump Splunk Web from Shell
By: Benjamin Macher
Tags: Refresh, Splunk, Dashboard, Shell, Bump

What really annoys me when working with JavaScript in Splunk dashboards is to always bump manually when changing even a little, tiny thing. Code something! Save! Open http://localhost:8000/en-US/_bump! Click button! Refresh the dashboard! So wouldn’t it be nice to hit the save button and Splunk is bumped somehow automatically? Here you go:

Assuming, you are in appserver/static/ inside a Splunk app. Create a file called bump.sh and paste in the following code, which will bump Splunk and restart Splunk Web.

Now we need to run this script whenever we change something. The following script will do the job for you. Well, you could also use nodemon to watch for changes ( (npx) nodemon --watch . —-exec "sh bump.sh" ), however then you need to either install it globally ( -g ) or locally.

Save your code, refresh the dashboard and et voilà see your recent changes!

//BMA
If a picture is worth a thousand words, you can replace a whole article with a graphic
By: Marius Popescu
Tags: Data Visualization, Infographics, Dashboard, Graphics, Tiny

Did you know that for a 5-minutes speech or presentation you need to prepare no more than 500 words?

This kind of technical detail provokes resistance: why only 500 words?

It is the same for your introductory story. You write it down and you follow the logical steps to present your points one by one. Wrong! You should dig into your story and find at around 100 words the drama, the curiosity element which will attract your reader’s attention. Why 100 words?

Same thing for the 2-parts sandwich tactic. Why should you keep the ending of your story up to the end? This is needed to maintain your listener’s attention and close the presented topic in their minds.

What if you replaced the rest of an article like this one with a single infographic (instead of writing 1000 words or more)

Article writing structure infographic, presenting a 5-steps method based on techniques from Sean D’Souza, Seth Godin and Story Grid (and many others)

Your turn now

What 20-minutes presentation (or a thousand words article) can you transform in an infographic?

Send your questions and ideas via the Tiny Graphics mailing list.

PS

I love using the Balsamiq tool for creating infographics. It is supposed to be a prototyping tool for screens and apps, but its secret power is that it’s also a tool which helps you to create very good-looking tiny graphics.
The goal of a tiny graphic is to convince people to act
By: Marius Popescu
Tags: Data Visualization, Infographics, Dashboard, Graphics, Tiny

Every time a company moves its offices to a new location people are affected, especially the new office is a bit far from the old one. Even in these times, when people work from home if it’s possible, the reflection in choosing a future office location is a complex one.

From the employees’ perspective, they will probably have to change their commute habits. Some will change the transportation mode, others will have to shift their working hours. You can do some research before selecting the office location, and calculate the impact it will have on the team’s commute. After the selection, you can do an audit and plan for remote work or other means to help the most affected people.

Begin by making the problem visible, then find ways to improve the situation. Here a mini chart to compare commute durations BEFORE/AFTER a move for a team of 10 people.

Start with the problem and show the arguments needed to convince people to act

Office usage has become much more fluid the last 5–10 years, with people using more and more part-time work or working from home. As a manager, team leader, or if you are responsible for the people side of your organization, you can have an overview picture of the office “use”.

You can calculate the needed office space by taking into account part-time work and partial remote work. Discuss this with your colleagues and take into account their working hours, as they are adjusted to their family lives. Show you value your team by taking into account each person and fine-tune what you can to provide them with an effective team space.

Your turn now

What stressful issue do you have which could be expressed visually, so that responsible people could act?

Send your questions and ideas via the Tiny Graphics mailing list.

PS

The last 20 years I have lived through 3 office relocations and remote work. I used to commute by bike, sometimes by bus, nowadays mostly by car. Try to see the good side of this lost time, as commute can be (up to a point) a physical exercise, or a daily rendez-vous with learning and podcasts.
Survival of an Accountant in a FP&A world!
Tags: Fiverr, Self Improvement, Dashboard, Finance

This is my first effort on writing, and this is a survival tip for all those accountants, like me, who are unable to get noticed due to lack of excel visualization skills.

So I work in the Finance — Accounting section of a manufacturing company. 24 years experience, awesome in my job. But in the last 10 years I have seen youngsters, taking up the data created by my team, prepping it up, and showcasing it to management and board. Have been exploring ways to over come it, and did end up learning enough in Excel for survival. I also took outside help, by investing in myself, and my need. This helped me get ahead, and showcase my work, myself! There were 4 actions that I took, hope it helps one of you too!

Learnt basis excel data visualization methods — Including creating simple pivots, tables with vlookup and sumif formulas, and graphical presentation, I was able to present my data in a better manner. There are scores of videos in YouTube that helped me out. Please invest time on yourself. Enrolled in couple of online courses in platforms like Udemy.com. This helped me understand the basic framework of dashboard creation. How the data should flow, how the summary tab should tell story of your numbers effortlessly. However, being more into accounting and numbers than “Index” and “Match”, it was difficult to replicate. Also with a full time job (anyone who is in accounting knows our crazy work hours), I could not invest the time that was needed to learn new skill. Then I started looking for models I could replicate. I again enrolled in some coaching classes, with the purpose of buying some templates that I could replicate. Simple cost analysis, Forecast vs actuals dashboard etc. This helped me tremendously.

4. Last, I would say icing in the cake was a newbie freelancer in #Fiverr (https://www.fiverr.com/share/9GK4zD). I provided the input data format (due to data security maintained by my company, I did not share the actual file. The format she prepared and shared back was amazing. I selected the person based on reviews, and pricing. And her ability to work with you on your ask, not provide half baked input I would get free of cost from open web.

Screen shot of the dashboard I got back.

Thats my story of doing something to better myself.

Please leave your comments on how you have made your skill set better. I am constantly searching for ways to improve!
How to show a better service using the same timeline for different solutions
By: Marius Popescu
Tags: Data Visualization, Infographics, Dashboard, Graphics, Tiny

To improve their service product companies can follow these 3 directions :

Shorter time for your customers to obtain the same results

Better results for your customers in the same time period

Helping your customers serve more of their customers in the same time period

Which one do you choose to improve? There is no wrong answer. However, the choice you make will change your product’s direction.

Provide your different customers with a way to compare their team’s commute duration with other similar companies.

When we look at the time plan from the customer’s perspective, only some of the improvements appear as possible options

Now if we go back to your perspective, what option can YOU see which helps your customers, and which cannot be seen from their perspective?

As an example, what if you offer your customers the possibility to work TOGETHER with other similar companies? Or just to SEE how other similar companies work.

Other examples:

you provide a space where your customers see each other’s work, in groups, as milestones

free more of your customer’s time by providing an automatic process (or service outsourcing solution)

make visible how one of your customers work to the others, help them align on the best path for better results, using the same time scale

Your turn now

What option can you come up with, which isn’t visible from your customer’s perspective?

Send your questions and ideas via the Tiny Graphics mailing list.

PS

Writing the articles for this Advent Calendar was not an easy task, though I usually write about 4–6 articles a month. However, using the parallel article writing method I could prepare the first two weeks in advance.
Streamlit極簡易的Dashboard開發
Tags: Streamlit, Python, Dashboard

Streamlit 元件添加

基本上官網上的cheatsheet → https://share.streamlit.io/daniellewisdl/streamlit-cheat-sheet/app.py

已經跟你說明所有可以添加的元件了。

但是我就說明幾個常用的就好，

st.title(‘添加標題’)

#在網頁呈現 h1 大小的文字

st.header('副標題')

#在網頁呈現 h2 大小的文字 st.write(‘寫上一些文字’)

#在網頁呈現文字 a = st.number_input(label = '輸入一些數字', value = 預設值, step = 步數, max_value = 最大值, min_value = 最小值)

#在網頁創建數字輸入框，然後將輸入值指派到a變數內 b = st.text_input('輸入一些文字')

#在網頁創建文字輸入框，然後將輸入值指派到b變數內 c = st.selectbox('請選擇',options = ['A','B','C'])

#在網頁創建選擇框，然後將輸入值指派到c變數內 st.dataframe(dataframe)

#在網頁將pandas的DF顯示出來

輸入元件error的出現

這邊要提一下如果兩個輸入框完全一模一樣會出錯

a = st.number_input(label = '請輸入數字')

b = st.number_input(label = '請輸入數字')

這樣就會出錯，所以至少要改一下

a = st.number_input('請輸入數字1')

b = st.number_input('請輸入數字2')

sidebar 元件

如果要將元件添加到就好網頁旁邊sidebar的話，很簡單，多加一個sidebar就好。例如

import streamlit as st

st.sidebar.header('在sidebar添加標題')

a = st.sidebar.number_input(label = '在sidebar輸入一些數字')

b = st.sidebar.text_input(label = '在sidebar輸入一些文字', value= '請在此輸入文字')

加入 if 運算

可以用if確定有一些輸入值之後再去做運算或是呈現。

因為只要輸入值有改變，程式就會重跑，所以a跟b 剛開始是0, 0 所以對python來說是a or b 是false，但輸入值改變之後，a跟 b 都不等於 0 的時候就是True了 ，也因為如此if 後面就有作用，就會出現在網頁上了。

import streamlit as st st.title('相加')

a = st.number_input(label = '請輸入數字1', step =1, value=0)

b = st.number_input(label = '請輸入數字2', step =1, value=0) # 確定a b 都有值之後 在輸出值

if a or b:

st.write('相加結果')

st.write(a+b)

圖表元件的加入

有很多種方式，但是st 自己內建的比較陽春。所以我是用plotly，然後再去用streamlit顯示。

import plotly.express as px

import streamlit as st df = px.data.iris() st.dataframe(df)

#在網頁上呈現DF fig = px.scatter(df, x="sepal_width", y="sepal_length", color="species", size='petal_length', hover_data=['petal_width'])

#創造一個px scatter chart的物件 st.plotly_chart(fig)

#在網頁上呈現plotly chart

快取的使用

因為每次只要有輸入值的改變，網頁都必須要重新跑，所以可以利用@st.cache() 的裝飾器，就可以將之前讀取過的資料放快取，然後下次如果輸入值沒變的情況下，就可以直接將之前的data讀取出來，速度會快上取多，尤其是如果你資料的讀取非常耗時的話。

但是這個裝飾器只能用在function上，所以就必須把拿取資料的方式改成def

import plotly.express as px import streamlit as st @st.cache()

def get_data():

df = px.data.iris()

return df

#將讀取資料的方式變成function

#再利用st.cache()將資料放進快取內 df = get_data() st.dataframe(df) fig = px.scatter(df, x="sepal_width", y="sepal_length", color="species",size='petal_length', hover_data=['petal_width']) st.plotly_chart(fig)

整個streamlit 的簡介就到這邊。
Show the speed of a process by comparing different solutions
By: Marius Popescu
Tags: Data Visualization, Infographics, Dashboard, Graphics, Tiny

Episode #15 of the Tiny Graphics Advent Calendar, published by Marius Popescu for De Amicis.

Is your company a rabbit or a turtle?

We are attracted by the startup stories, announcing rounds and rounds of funding and million dollars evaluations. There is a lot of money, a lot of buzz on the internet, and unfortunately not so much value in their products.

At the same time, quite a few smaller companies do their work every day and help their customers.

The rabbit is fast, but it doesn’t achieve its goal, because it gets distracted.

The turtle is slowly building its product by delivering value. And it most often reaches its goal because it helps the customer. Let’s take the example of marketing.

How can you consistently publish every week, 52 weeks per year

The biggest issue is the time it takes, every week, to write the articles, which means:

come up with an Outline

write the Draft

add a Story

Edit the result before publication

To add consistency to this method, you need to do one step each day.

Having one task per day is already easier than taking the whole day to write an article. However, work tends to fill up the available time. So if you say you’ll write a part of the article each day, one hour each day, you will spend at least 5 hours each week to finish an article.

All year long, that’s hard to follow, and consistency will suffer. And you won’t even dream of creating graphics and adding images to your content.

What happens if you write TWO articles in parallel, each week? You still try to spend no more than an hour each day, but now you have TWO articles at the end of the week.

What can parallel work do to your timeline?

Writing two articles per week allows you to regularly publish and choose your rhythm. Three articles a week allow you to publish the whole year in just four months (graphic built using Excel).

Unbundle your task and go methodically over each part to find how to better solve the problem, over and over again. If you are part of a rabbit company, I mean high-growth startup, what can you do the turtle way?

Your turn now

What can you build the turtle way, slowly and gradually, providing as much help as possible for your customers?

Send your questions and ideas via the Tiny Graphics mailing list.

PS

I am quite methodic about my work, and from the outside, while building a system, it looks slow. But when the turtle pushes a fine-tuned flywheel, watch it take off!
Mozaïk Dashboard AMI
By: Classmethod Canada
Tags: Data Visualization, Data, Mozaik, Dashboard

Mozaïk Dashboard AMI

Overview

Amazon Linux/UNIX

Node.js node_modules

Mozaïk-demo v1

This AMI provides Mozaïk dashboard package, Node JS, and PM2 pre-installed.

Accessing instance

After you have provisioned the AMI, go to the AWS console where you set up your EC2 instance (for example, go to EC2 console in the Oregon region under your AWS account). Click on the instance you launched, and make note of the public DNS (IPv4) address or the IPv4 Public IP address.

To configure the Mozaïk dashboard, you will need to SSH into the EC2 instance with your AWS Keypair. The username to log in to the Linux system is ec2-user.

ssh -i {YOUR-CERT-NAME}.pem ec2-user@XX.XXX.XXX.XX

Mozaik package is installed and can be found in the app folder

/home/apps/mozaik-demo

Run the app

Run the Mozaïk app with node or npm.

node app.js

Alternatively, PM2 is also installed, the user may use PM2 commands to daemonize and monitor the application.

pm2 start /home/apps/mozaik-demo/app.js

For further pm2 commands, refer to the pm2 documentation.

The Mozaïk demo package is downloaded from plouc’s GitHub. The detail on how to perform common tasks can be found in the Readme.

Configuration

You can modify the config.js file to customize your dashboard. such as defying dashboard layout, setting themes, and using widgets.

/home/apps/mozaik-demo/config.js

For further instruction please refer to the Mozaïk(v1) user guide.

Troubleshooting

If the listening post is not responding, you can change the port number by using the following command.

export PORT=3000

Reference:
When should you align different quantities on the same period of time
By: Marius Popescu
Tags: Data Visualization, Graphic Design, Infographics, Dashboard, Tiny

This year France decided to postpone Black Friday with a week. Due to the healthcare crisis and people being still in lock-down, keeping the same date as elsewhere in the world would mean another catastrophic season for brick and mortar stores.

So now after the event, how could you compare Black Friday sales in France on the 4th of December with all the other countries, which kept the original date of 27th November?

Align your data to the same timeline to compare different years or similar periods

Instead of looking at 10 years data, compare current year with the mean of previous years (here my household Electricity Mean Cost Evolution in 2020 compared with 2009–2019 period, EUR/week)

This alignment in timelines brings two or more different volumes on the same timescale. This is a good way if you want to visually compare the outcome of two crises. Year-on-Year data compared with previous years is another example.

Coming back to your product, you could do the same with your annual sales. For example to see which times of the year sales are lower than others (and do something about it).

You could also go further and do the same comparison with your non-product sales, such as consulting and training. Create charts for your company three business lanes:

- products which are used by customers practically without your help

- consulting hours where your presence is required

- training for people or groups in solving their problem with or without your product

Your turn now

What different quantities could you compare on the same timescale?

Send your questions and ideas via the Tiny Graphics mailing list.

PS

To be able to bring lots of different volumes on the same timescale you need to reflect on and build reference data. What is your “normal chart” and what is the statistical distribution? This will help you evaluate one year’s volume with the historical reference data.
Criptomonedas e índices financieros.
By: Julio Ibarra
Tags: Dashboard

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How to show your product’s impact using tiny graphics
By: Marius Popescu
Tags: Data Visualization, Infographics, Dashboard, Graphics, Tiny

In 2004 I discovered the software build idea. Before the process would have been manual, prone to errors, stressful. All of a sudden, this part was smooth and easy.

All you had to do was to do it very slowly once and describe the process using a build tool. This tool then could be called whenever a new version was needed and it would just take over the painful process and do it for you.

What does your product do which relieves a big pain for your customer?

How could I describe in quantities the ease that this build tools bring to the developers?

have a new version prepared in minutes, instead of hours, and with no forgotten parts

get the process documented automatically, no need to write the documents for days after a new release

one or 15 product versions take about the same time to prepare, that was not the case when using a manual process

Express the impact your product has on your customers by showing how they use it in ways that were not possible before (here paper growth charts are replaced by the GrowthXP integrated growth monitoring module)

When your product’s value is bigger when used more, you get to the exponential impact level

If your product is gaining time for your customers, look at the situation where two departments use it. Do the time gains accumulate, or do they multiply?

Your customer gets a chart when they use your product. They usually need it for their decision process. Could they get also get the chart as calculations in return? This could allow other uses based on the calculations they do all year long, like quality statistics, outliers, or trends of these results.

Measure the different levels your product’s value can impact your customers business and base your graphics on these measurements. This kind of graphics will also teach your customers how to use your product and get much more value from using it.

Your turn now

What is the biggest impact of your product has for your customers, and what became possible for them to do now?

Send your questions and ideas via the Tiny Graphics mailing list.

PS

The most surprising example I still recall is the automated book production of the Pragmatic Programmers. Their process retrieves the text, chapters, images, footnotes, examples, and then it testes the whole, and it produces a book. Exponential impact.
Redis Key Dashboard
By: Halil Tuğcan Özaktaş
Tags: Keys, Dashboard, Memory Management, Redis

This tool allows you to do a small analysis of the amount of keys and memory you use in Redis. It allows you to see overlooked keys and notice overuse.

Source Code

How to work ?

Groups all keys with ‘SCAN’ by name. It then lists the dimensions it occupies in memory with the group prefixes that it determines. It does this in batches of 1000. Therefore, it does not create load on the CPU side during the process.

If you just want to get the key list, it can extract 13–14GB of redis data in 50–55 seconds.

Warning : Memory analysis increases the time spent.
Dockerised Tabler(Dashboard UI)
By: Thomas Suebwicha
Tags: Github, Dockerfiles, Dashboard, Docker, Application Development

By Thomas Suebwicha

Written December 10, 2020

Last Edited Decemeber 13, 2020

I’ve been using docker for the last few months now and with the thought of seeing if applications (as servers) exists on docker, excite me. It means I have a modular application, I don’t have to deal with installed files left behind. Instead these application can be used with mounts (folders on my computer mounted onto that server) and containers that can be deleted with ease and completeness.

With the recent thought of looking into dashboards. Benefit of offering a cool complete insiders to everything in one location.

I discovered tabler from a random browse on GitHub, wondering if there is any open source version that exist with most trends going in this direction. I also thought to challenge myself to build a docker version for future experimentation. Especially with current stand point where most applications are becoming cloud native. So here’s a few commands to get it running on your computer(assuming you have docker desktop installed)!

To get started, pull my docker image.

$ docker pull docker push yellosa96/tabler:2.0

The dockerfile

FROM ruby:alpine3.12

COPY tabler-dev /tabler-files

RUN apk add --update --no-cache alpine-sdk nodejs npm git

RUN npm install

RUN gem install bundler

RUN bundle install

ENTRYPOINT [ "npm","run","start" ]

EXPOSE 3000

What this dockerfile does is copy of tabler-dev branch into the image. It then progresses to update and install the required tools. The dockerfile follows instructions similar to the ReadMe on the Tabler repository. This is then followed by running the application in the second to last step. The expose command connects the internal docker container to the host(your computer) so you can see what’s happening.

To run

$ docker run -dp 3000:3000 --name tabler yellosa96/tabler:2.0

Finally go to http://localhost:3000 (click here) to see the final result!

You should see something amazing just like the demo version. Now I hope that helped you be able to dockerise your version of tabular with ease!

Looks like this

To Delete

$ docker container kill tabler

References:

Github — https://github.com/yelloSA96/exp/tree/tabler

Docker Hub Repository — https://hub.docker.com/repository/docker/yellosa96/tabler
How to show the many ways your product helps your customers
By: Marius Popescu
Tags: Data Visualization, Infographics, Dashboard, Graphics, Tiny

What is the value of a gift? If it’s big, expensive, or rare, it has a great value, and if not, then it represents a small value. Right?

What you need to remember is that customers are first and foremost people. They have feelings, are busy, tired, alone, happy. And they are running around doing a thousand small things at this time of the year.

Even if your product is helping them doing their job better, faster and more cost-effective, there are other ways it can serve them.

Your customers need solutions for their problems, but they also need to be taught, helped or just to be heard.

The one thing a product should do, apart from what it already does, it is to be easy to learn. You can add secondary features (or graphics) to your product to help the users do a better job.

The iA Writer Style Check function helps writers learn how to write better. The proposed improvements are visually suggested in the text being edited.

How easy to learn is your product?

Developers are a proud bunch, they love to say that their products are so simple, clear and easy to use, that people don’t need any training. Except when you show their interfaces to a designer you see there is work to do. And when you see someone using your software, still more work to do.

If you want to focus on easy to use metrics, you can start inside the software. Begin to teach the users easier steps to take to do their job. Explain what happened. Show how to revert decisions. Make them comfortable.

That can go further, you can have a help dashboard inside the software, showing the 5 best things a user can learn to better use it.

Furthermore, you can publish the results of this teaching, as the 5 best features any user should learn to greatly increase the value they get from the software.

JetBrains products (mainly for developers, the irony) often show the keyboard shortcuts the user could have used instead using the mouse, right after an action. This continuously informs and trains your users.

Your turn now

Think of 3 tiny and useful features you would teach your customers.

Send your questions and ideas via the Tiny Graphics mailing list.

PS

For my 40 years anniversary I got a Porsche. I know, so cliché. Even though it was a small toy, it had a great value by what it the symbolized.
Overview of the Apps Script dashboard
By: Jasper Duizendstra
Tags: Google Apps Script, Dashboard

The Apps Script dashboard lets you manage and monitor your Apps Script projects. This is the first sentence in the documentation about the Apps Script dashboard. It describes the high level purpose of the Apps Script dashboard, but what does that mean in real live environments. In this article I will describe some of my use cases for the Apps Script dashboard.

Photo by Mitchel Boot on Unsplash

Opening the Apps Script dashboard is usually the first step I take whenever I start working in a new environment. I work for multiple companies and I have a lot of Google Accounts. It is great to see all the projects in the “All Projects” section. This will immediately give you an idea of what kind of projects you have access to. This might sound obvious but when I opened the dashboard of my oldest account and sorted on the last modified date I saw a script last modified on Dec 2, 2010.

Projects overviews

The “My Projects” and “Shared with me” are nice subsets of the projects. I do miss a better filter and sorting on the owner would also be great. If you hover over a project you can open the project information by clicking on the information icon. The information page provides an overview of the script and container if it is a container bound script.

Starring projects is one of the most useful features for me. Hover over a project and use the three dots to open the menu and star the project. In the screenshot below I have starred five projects.

This overview shows all the relevant information for the starred projects.

Executions and triggers

The “My Triggers” and “My Executions” sections show your executions and triggers. This can be confusing because there can be other executions and triggers. Open the project itself if you want to see all the executions and triggers.

You can use the filters to limit the rows in the overview:

In the “My Triggers” section you can see all your triggers. Hover over the trigger and use the pencil icon if you want to edit the trigger. The trigger can be deleted in the menu that opens with the three dots.

The rest of the options

In the “Getting Started” you will find additional information and some starter projects. The “Settings” section only contains the option to enable the Google Apps Script API. And finally the “Service Status” section links to useful sections in the Guides.

Wrapping up

In this article I have discussed the “quirks and features” of the Apps Script dashboard. The Apps Script dashboard provides a bird’s-eye view of all the Google Apps Script script you own or have access to. It also enables you to dive right into the project information.

For me the Apps Script dashboard is the first thing I see when I start working on a new project or when I want to get familiar with the Google Apps Script scripts available for an account.
Top 5 free or affordable dashboard and SQL reporting tools in 2021
By: Sprinkle Data
Tags: Data Science, Dashboard, Data, Sql, Etl

Every startups and SMEs would like to have a free or at the most affordable tools for their business.

Most small businesses find it hard to afford the modern day data handling tools whereas big enterprises don’t have any obstacles when it comes to pricing.

We have made an in-depth analysis on the 5 best free or affordable SQL reporting tools and open source dashboard reporting tools for Startups and SMEs

Sprinkle Data — Free plan, with paid plans starting from $200-$500

— Free plan, with paid plans starting from $200-$500 Metabase — Starts at $100/month to $300/month business plans

— Starts at $100/month to $300/month business plans Chartio — Starts at $400/month and goes up to $900/month

— Starts at $400/month and goes up to $900/month Redash — Starts at $49/month and goes up to $450/month

— Starts at $49/month and goes up to $450/month Mode Analytics — Mode Studio is free, Mode Business allows 14 day trial

To access the complete blog and understand the pros and cons of each tool, click on the following link

Top 5 free or affordable dashboard and SQL reporting tools in 2021
Variable thresholds for your Power BI alerts with a streaming dataset
By: Erik Hamoen
Tags: Real Time Streaming Data, Alerts, Dashboard, Powershell, Power Bi

Power BI Alerts are an interesting way to notify you when something is wrong. In this article, I will show you how to set up alerts with a variable threshold. For this example, I use a streaming dataset, created in Power BI, and a PowerShell script I got from the guys at Guy in a Cube.

So first we create a streaming dataset in Power BI:

Don’t forget to turn on historic data analysis as mentioned in the video, otherwise, you can’t create a report! The values are standard so don’t worry about that now! Next, you go to API info and copy the endpoint (Push URL):

Now we copy this script, paste it in PowerShell, paste the endpoint at the variable on top and run it:

We can now create a report on the dataset:

But unfortunately, we can’t create measures in Power BI Service and we can’t download this PBIX. So the only card visuals we can make are: max, average, sum etc. and of course line graphs:

The line graph I made filters by the last 120 rows I got for my input. Otherwise, we would get a graph that is impossible to read. And on the other hand, we aren’t very interested in data from multiple hours ago, but you can always change this.

For the card with “latest CPU”, I filter by TopN (1) on the latest time, to get the latest value from the CPU. When I pin this to my dashboard I get the following results:

Now we can set alerts on my Latest CPU Card:

Unfortunately, we can only create static thresholds. But if we take a look at the graph, we can see a great difference between the numbers, so what I actually want is a threshold that looks at the average of the last five rows, with a margin of five, because its normal that my CPU increases, but I want to be alerted for these spikes. To do this, we have to create a new report in Power BI desktop, based on the streaming dataset, so we can create measures!
How to express your value proposition
By: Marius Popescu
Tags: Data Visualization, Infographics, Dashboard, Graphics, Tiny

Solutions. Features. We are your company’s exclusive partner for your digital development… Who cares?

The only thing your customers care is how will you help them solve their problem. The rest of your words do not matter, or they matter so much less.

How do you express your value proposition? The value of your product needs to be translated into something valuable for your customer. Money. Time. Quality of service.

If you asked them today what do they gain from using your product, what would they answer?

online shop handling with no trouble Valentine’s Day, Black Friday, Christmas and sales promotions (without extra costs)

automatically sending and receiving messages between the medical services inside and outside the hospital

15 minutes instead of 2 hours to draw a family tree in a genetic consultation

diabetes-focused dashboard for diabetes type I patients

manage website content with no technical knowledge

Even when there seems to be no way to quantify it, there is always a possibility to express a product’s value. Because there is a different situation before and after using the product.

Compare the before and after situations for customers of your product (here, a survey on handling medical documents and messages, Lifen France, 2018)

Before:

you invested a lot in your online shop, but the servers could never survive the sales periods

it took you 2 hours to draw a family tree, for each consultation

sometimes you had to manually handle messaging in the hospital, which cost a lot and was error-prone

you previously had to pay a company to write and publish your articles on your website

you used printed growth charts to track specific patients, losing time and without the possibility to analyse the data

Compare the before and after situation to find how to express the value delivered by your product

After:

your online shop handles sales rush periods with no problem and no extra costs

spend more time with your patient in genetic consultations by using only 15 minutes to draw the family tree

increase the speed and the quality of delivery for hospital messages and reduce communication costs

publish your articles yourself in less time and without paying consultants

forget paper records and improve patient, service and hospital quality of care for specific affections by using electronic growth charts

Your turn now

How could you compare the situations before and after using your product?

Send your questions and ideas via the Tiny Graphics mailing list.

PS

To have a good before and after image use customer testimonials. Send a questionnaire before starting the service, and another one afterwards (extra points if you ask their opinion during the onboarding phase).
A quick Visualization on Super Store Dataset using Tableau
By: Vikas Bhat
Tags: Data Visualization, Data Science, Tableau, Dashboard, Data Analysis

A visual dashboard analysis on super store dataset.

Tableau Dashboard

Data visualization is the graphical representation of information and data. By using visual elements like charts, graphs, and maps, data visualization tools provide an accessible way to see and understand trends, outliers, and patterns in data.

In the world of Big Data, data visualization tools and technologies are essential to analyze massive amounts of information and make data-driven decisions.

Data visualization is another form of visual art that grabs our interest and keeps our eyes on the message. When we see a chart, we quickly see trends and outliers. If we can see something, we internalize it quickly. It’s storytelling with a purpose. If you’ve ever stared at a massive spreadsheet of data and couldn’t see a trend, you know how much more effective a visualization can be

Thank you everyone. Happy reading.
How to use market analysis to find comparative data
By: Marius Popescu
Tags: Data Visualization, Infographics, Dashboard, Graphics, Tiny

It is a paradox, but the smaller is a company, the more it works to adapt to various customers, to automate the business, and to fix all the issues.

Imagine a situation where a team needs to handle and translate 15 country versions. It looks obvious that a bigger company should be better at handling this situation, right?

The same way, it seems logical that an open-source or free product should be better than yours. Until the first problem and the moment where the client realises that the last time the open-source product was updated was 7 years ago.

To take an example, let’s look at ZentoShop, an online e-commerce solution using a subscription model. The difference with the classic solutions in this market is the dynamic capacity adjustment following the actual demand for each online shop.

Doing a full-year comparison, including the sales rush periods, shows the different answers given to customer’s real needs by alternative solutions (the ZentoShop dynamic cloud hosting handles visitor peaks with no extra costs)

You don’t have to show that your product is the best in the world, just that it is best for your customers

Comparing your services with the competition can be a tricky business. When you put up a table with columns for each competitor and your product, you implicitly say that:

your company is not the only one providing similar services

listed competitors are the most important ones for you (or for customers)

you are focused on the market addressed by the table

Even though your company is unique, it still exists in a context given by the domain, by your typical customers or by your competition. However, you must clarify in your graphics or in the surrounding text for which points your solution is unique.

Use the competition data to your advantage

Instead of comparing directly with your competitors, you should rather show the reasons why you’re the right choice.

Competition is a free or open-source project?

Show how your product answers the following points:

the satisfaction for your customer support services

the continuous update of the product following customer requests

the onboarding customer procedures (your customers are not alone)

How about if the competition is a big company?

You can focus on your strengths:

Your turn now

What market analyses can you use to compare your product to others?

Send your questions and ideas via the Tiny Graphics mailing list.

PS

The example above concentrates on one thing: the better handling of ecommerce website visitors using a cloud solution. You can add a second dimension by showing periods of time where the other server types are not used.
How to find quantity data in your notes
By: Marius Popescu
Tags: Data Vizualisation, Infographics, Dashboard, Graphics, Tiny

Journaling is a great way to get out of your head the struggles of the days and questions which trouble you. But it would be awesome if someone could write it for us, right?

The next best thing is using analytical tools which can send you regular reports on your work habits.

EmailMeter reports how many emails you send or receive every month. Over time, I have written down these values in a Google Sheet and I have a chart showing how I’m doing in communication efforts month after month and year after year.

Sent and received emails statistical tables covering 2012 to 2020 (using Google Sheets)

Getting back to my notes years after I find interesting thoughts and also fresh impressions. It’s like going back to your children’s photos when they were still babies. Even though you can imagine how they looked and you recall many things, your train of thought at the time has faded.

The same way, if you look over your product notes and presentations from the old days you will recall how it felt at the start. What dreams your team had at the time. Where you thought you were heading, and where did you land.

Where to find actual notes about your product development

presentations for the pilot and the first version

project and task management databases

strategy documents like SWAT marketing analysis

business plans and projections

organizational charts

feature-specific development notes

timesheets and team effort spent over years

Your turn now

Where would you search for notes and journals related to your product development?

Send your questions and ideas via the Tiny Graphics mailing list.

PS

RescueTime is another tool I use to track applications usage. You can note any activity from focus to distraction, and every week you get an automatic report showing how you spent your work time.
How to discover historical information about your own products
By: Marius Popescu
Tags: Data Vizualisation, Infographics, Dashboard, Graphics, Tiny

Good to Great is a masterpiece for understanding how companies grow and stagnate or take their flight. It took a detective’s work to document all the company data needed to create this project. And a team. And time. A lot of time.

Creating, organizing, and making a product work takes a lot of time too.

In order to build your timeline behave like a detective. You don’t know this company, these people, and you somehow got access to all the network and all the files.

But how to make sure you will be able to find historical data in the future

In 2010–2011 I was on a big project with a big customer and I realized I spent too much time writing emails instead of developing and testing the project. That was taking a toll on my energy, so I started taking notes in an Excel sheet the number of emails I sent and received, and to how many people. I used GmailMeter (at the time).

Now, almost 10 years later, I’m using its successor, EmailMeter. And I can show you how the email stats look like after all this time. What information can we find in these statistics?

The statistics show annual trends (and notice when there are peaks in communications)

This helps me see when a month is too busy on the email side and how a year compares to another on this front.

Now that you want to act like a detective, where would you look? What data you would search for? Here are some ideas.

Where can you find data to create one, two or ten timelines for your company graphics

deployment folders

release emails

source code history (dates, labels, tags, branches)

conference participation notes (may also be milestones for your product)

archive folders for reference data

formats or standards you were using, to correlate with their timeline

internal wiki, blogs, slack or forums

company registration information, like creation and office addresses and numbers of employees

CRM for customer numbers, types, countries etc

databases — registries, messaging, quantify data on important topics

Your turn now

List 5 data sources where you can find historical information about your product

Send your questions and ideas via the Tiny Graphics mailing list.

PS

I also note down my electricity and water consumptions and costs and make charts to understand the data (call me a data visualization lover if you like)
Easily Build a Dashboard with R 🖥️
Tags: Introduction, R Markdown, Flexdashboard, R Programming, Dashboard

The flexdashboard package allows R programmers to easily develop interactive dashboards. The package is used with R markdown. Dashboards can be static via a HTML webpage or dynamic via a R Shiny document. These are great for storytelling or metrics tracking. There are numerous custom layouts and components that can be added to your dashboard. It can also be used with R Shiny.

Here are flexdashboard examples (with accessible source code) that are provided by RStudio. Use cases include narrative visualizations, metrics tracking, disease tracking dashboards, and many more.

🚦Can you think of your own ways to use the package?

Get started

To install the Flexdashboard package in RStudio use the following:

install.packages(“flexdashboard”)

The following R markdown code can be used for a simple stacked layout for your content (copy and paste into an R markdown file then Knit the code to see the webpage that gets produced):

---

title: "Stacked Layout Example"

output: flexdashboard::flex_dashboard

---



### First chart



```{r} ```



### Second chart ```{r} ```

Next steps

⌛This is meant to be a quick introduction to the package. If you want an easy to develop and deploy dashboard in R, then you should definitely check out the Flexdashboard package. They have more complex layout options that you can choose and build from. Visit the official Flexdashboard website for more information.
Creating dynamic dashboards with Streamlit
By: M Khorasani
Tags: Data Visualization, Data Science, Dashboard, Cloud Computing, Computer Science

Creating dynamic dashboards with Streamlit

Photo by Stephen Dawson on Unsplash

Introduction

For those of us who have heralded all the bells and whistles brought into existence by Streamlit, from its ease of use to its ability to create powerful visualizations, we’ve largely overlooked one really handy feature. Its ability to render dynamic dashboards that can be updated in real time. I gather that most users are using Streamlit to create static dashboards or at most are utilizing the multitude of widgets available to redact dataframes that are then fed back into their visualizations. But I haven’t really seen anyone using one of the greatest inherent capabilities of Streamlit - to create instantaneously and constantly changing visuals. Bring in the mighty ‘placeholder.’

Streamlit Placeholders

Placeholders in Streamlit figuratively allow you to reserve a spot at the table should you choose to use it later at a time of your choice or not at all. As per Streamlit’s own API, the placeholder:

Inserts a container into your app that can be used to hold a single element. This allows you to, for example, remove elements at any point, or replace several elements at once (using a child multi-element container).

Perhaps it was solely designed to enable you to retroactively insert an element or widget just once into your code post an event. Regardless, it gives us this unique vantage to be able to constantly feed a stream of anything into the placeholder, effectively rendering a dashboard that is updating in real time. Without further ado, let me show you how to create a radar chart that is updated continuously.

Packages

First thing’s first, lets go ahead and insert the stack of packages we’ll be using.

And incase you need to install any of the above packages, please proceed by using ‘pip install’ in Anaconda prompt.

pip install streamlit

Then we will create two placeholders, one for the radar chart itself and one for a start button that will trigger our script. You can name each placeholder as you wish by equating your instance name to ‘st.empty()’.

Plotly Radar Chart

Subsequently, we will create the function for the radar chart using Plotly. Mind you, the input here to the radar chart is a list of randomly changing numbers, however it could literally be anything else. You could interface the list with a stream of data coming in through a serial COM port or via a remote web server.

Notice how in the gist above we are writing the completed figure to the ‘placeholder’ we created earlier.

Finally, we wrap it all up by creating two buttons to start and stop the dynamic radar chart (the start button using a placeholder as well). In addition we use a while loop to continuously re-run our radar chart function with a sleep function to delay each iteration by half a second.

Results

And now you have it, our radar chart in a dynamically updated dashboard!