Wednesday, January 29, 2014

First steps to create your dashboards

One of the most typical situations with Dashbuilder is that you already have some existing data you want to create dashboards from.


You can add new dashboards by configuration with Dashbuilder's composition tool, by following these steps:

Step 01 - You must first carefully think what data needs to be displayed to users and which is the desired format. It’s both important to have the right data and to display it in simple and concise way. Dashboards must be simple to use and to understand, focusing on displaying only relevant information.

At this stage, you must also take into account performance and volume concerns.

Step 02 - Make sure the data is available through an standard protocol and a known format, suitable to be queried. Typically, a database or an structured file would be enough. If this is not available in this format, you can always create a new connector or publish it through any custom integration.

Step 03 - Setup connectivity parameters. By using the tool with the right privileges, you can define connectors parameters (i.e. JDBC connections) and data providers configuration (i.e. SQL queries)

Step 04 -  Configure one or several workspaces with as many pages as needed. Set up navigation across them, for example, by using the provided menus. It’s important to realize every page or workspace will have its own access URL, that can be linked from any other application.

Step 05 - Add indicators (charts) and reports to pages, and configure them. By using the KPI indicator editor, you set them to display the right information at the right place.

Step 06 - Configure filter and drill down capabilities. This component controls how navigation is performed when users click on the charts, by filtering the data by the right property value.

Step 07 - Set the right permissions for each level of information. You can define which elements of the dashboards should be visible or even editable for a different range of users or roles.

Step 08 - Customize look'n' feel. Sometimes, a custom look and feel is required. There are different tools to modify the standard look, by providing CSS and graphical resources, as well as custom HTML content.

Step 09 - Test your dashboards for each role.

Step 10 - Gather user feedback and improve your dashboards based on it.

You can find more information about how to implement each of these steps at the project's documentation page http://dashbuilder.org/documentation.html

Tuesday, January 28, 2014

Process monitoring with jBPM integration

Dashbuilder is packaged and automatically ready to use with jBPM 6 workbench (https://www.jboss.org/jbpm). By doing so, you will get several process and task related dashboards, that are connected to jBPM history log.

They will provide, for example, an overview of the running and completed processes and tasks. Different sort of reports and indicators will become available for BPM monitoring, including time related (i.e. average task durations) or instance related (i.e amount of active processes).

You can find the instructions to install this flavour of Dashbuilder at http://docs.jboss.org/jbpm/v6.0/userguide/jBPMGettingStarted.html

Read more about this integration at http://docs.jboss.org/jbpm/v6.0/userguide/chap-bam.html

Dashbuilder 6.0.1 released

A new version of Dashbuilder has been release along with the Drools & jBPM platform.
This version contains only some bug fixes. You can download it from here , and as always, you are more than welcome to provide feedback about it.
We will continue working on the new generation of Dashbuilder, that will greatly improve its integration and reporting capabilities.