

Ask HN: Anyone Familiar with Building Analytic Dashboards? - bbissoon

Hi HN, I'm running into a half-wall with building a dashboard to incorporate social media and google analytics of the user's website.<p>Anyone interested or could point me in the right direction to get started? Thanks all!
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SEJeff
I would suggest a few things. There are 3 presentations / blog posts that are
must reads for this sort of thing... Measure Anything, Measure Everything[1]
Metrics Driven Engineering[2] Metrics, Metrics, Everywhere[3]

The most common tool used for this is graphite[4]. Yelp also wrote their own
which is nice called Firefly[5]. If you go with graphite like most big
companies do, I would strongly suggest looking at graphene[6], gdash[7],
giraffe[8], tasseo[9], or cubism[10] dashboard frontends. Graphite has a lot
of "devops" community around it.

This should be enough to get you started :)

[1] [http://codeascraft.etsy.com/2011/02/15/measure-anything-
meas...](http://codeascraft.etsy.com/2011/02/15/measure-anything-measure-
everything/) [2] [http://www.slideshare.net/mikebrittain/metricsdriven-
enginee...](http://www.slideshare.net/mikebrittain/metricsdriven-engineering)
[3] <http://pivotallabs.com/139-metrics-metrics-everywhere/> [4]
<http://graphite.wikidot.com/> [5] <https://github.com/Yelp/Firefly> [6]
<http://jondot.github.com/graphene/> [7]
[http://www.devco.net/archives/2011/10/08/gdash-graphite-
dash...](http://www.devco.net/archives/2011/10/08/gdash-graphite-
dashboard.php) [8] <https://github.com/kenhub/giraffe> [9]
<https://github.com/obfuscurity/tasseo> [10]
<http://square.github.com/cubism/>

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gingerlime
+1 and thanks for the mention (I am the creator of Giraffe).

However, despite my support for open-source tools, and my deep love for
graphite, it might in some cases make more sense to use a commercial product.
There are many pretty neat commercial dashboards out there which could make
the setup and any learning-curve much easier.

Just to name a few I've heard of (never used, and in no particular order):
Librato metrics, ducksboard, geckoboard ... and probably many others I missed.

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davismwfl
Where are you getting hung up?

I have built a fair number of analytic dashboards for a variety of clients.
Google Analytics is pretty easy to export data from and integrate to overall.
Social is a little more of a pain depending on the source and what you are
trying to measure.

Overall I find the hardest part is selecting the metrics to communicate to the
client/user so you are providing the most value without noise. Creating the
dashboard(s) is usually the easy part, definition and analysis are where you
show the clients/users why you are special.

~~~
bbissoon
I'm being overwhelmed by where to began. I'm a solo founder and I'm building a
platform from the ground up but now - this part of the analytics is just so
fuzzy to me. Interested in talking via email?

My email is in my profile if you are? I can share some links - I can't post it
here because I don't know if the server can take the traffic.

~~~
davismwfl
Sure, I'll shoot you an email.

~~~
bbissoon
I dropped you a line. I'll edit my profile.

