
Cyclotron: A web application for constructing dashboards - severine
http://www.cyclotron.io/
======
agentgt
I would like to share some thoughts on this based on experience of being a
crusty old enterprise developer. The dashboard problem keeps coming back. I
think the time might be finally coming for some dashboard framework to
actually succeed.

A dashboard framework has been tried many many times. Here are some old ones
just on the top of my head:

* Shindig aka OpenSocial aka Google Gadgets

* J2EE portlets

* OpenUSS

I'm not sure why Shindig aka Google Gadgets failed but one of the complaint we
had on a product that I helped build that used Shindig is that business users
did not want the complexity of customizing a dashboard. That is hard coded
panels were good enough.

I guess just like many tech stuff (slack/irc, wiki) the timing and execution
just wasn't right. I think now that might change given the plethora of devops,
data driven biz, and generally improvement in tech awareness.

It would be nice if Cyclotron had some sort of spec (particularly language
agnostic) but I guess that failed hard for the above.

For my own small company we use Kibana (the old one that doesn't require
NodeJS), Grafana, and Jenkins.

Yes we use Jenkins as a dashboard. Jenkins is actually shockingly a good place
for a dashboard because every time we build/deploy or kick off some kind of
job we see the current status of stuff. I'm not sure why cloudbees hasn't
taken advantage of this. I honestly think it is the best place to put devopsy
like dashboards.

The other nice thing about Jenkins besides it actually kicking things off is
the notification. IMO notification is almost more important and more useful
than dashboards. The two should be not be far apart but for some reason in
most systems they are.

~~~
oblio
Jenkins: the duct tape and WD40 of software automation.

~~~
manyxcxi
I have seen people use it in some amazingly Rube Goldbergian ways for great
success. It's a real credit to the project and the ecosystem.

Easy enough to 'just get the thing done', but as complex as you want it to be.

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wrkronmiller
How does this compare to something like Grafana?
[https://github.com/grafana/grafana](https://github.com/grafana/grafana)

~~~
weego
Can I just take a moment, and I apologise up front for singling you out for
this one, to say how much I hate comments like this, even more that they get
upvoted.

There's always some arbitrary software mentioned that is often barely related
even tangentially and expect someone else to reply with the info.

If you want to know how it differs, YOU look it up and if the outcome of that
research is interesting enough YOU post it. Don't expect other people to do it
for you, or worse, make it so that the creator of something that might not
even be the one linking it feels like they have to justify why they open
sourced something.

~~~
dsjoerg
I disagree 100% with you. I love comments like GP. Any new tool should be
considered in comparison to the other tools one might use for the same job.

Is Grafana "barely related even tangentially"? No it is quite related.

Have the creators of Cyclotron considered how it compares to existing tools?
Probably, and they should come forward and be open about it.

~~~
kordless
> Probably, and they should come forward and be open about it.

No software developer is obligated to do anything for any of us. It's on US to
figure things out and share them as we see fit. Nobody cares if you are
willing to invest serious time looking into it or not. Asking a leading
question and linking to something _most_ of us have already seen is pointless.
Defending it when a good argument was presented is also pointless. I hazard
these discourses are linked to age.

~~~
Bjartr
Stop presuming that just because you're familiar with something that it's no
longer worth bringing up. I've never used any of these tools and value the
discussions about them that questions like the thread starter's allow.

Further, there are always new people looking to learn and grow. They shouldn't
be looked down upon simply because others got there first.

What makes you think the question was a leading question rather than a genuine
one? There isn't enough there to definitively determine the intent in any
case, so it's up to whoever responds to decide which way of reading the
question they will respond to, and that's an opportunity for the larger
software community and for the developers of the projects in question to
nurture thier communities. Just because it doesn't have value to you doesn't
mean it doesn't have value to others.

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rmanalan
There's also
[http://atlasboard.bitbucket.org/](http://atlasboard.bitbucket.org/)

~~~
ausjke
this one looks good and it uses postgres

~~~
agentgt
> this one looks good and it uses postgres

Where did you see that it uses Postgres? I think it stores its data in json
files.

~~~
ausjke
I checked out node_modules and found postgres there but I have not looked into
the src to see how it's hooked.

------
orenbarzilai
There is also Redash
[http://docs.redash.io/en/latest/](http://docs.redash.io/en/latest/) We are
using it and it's awesome.

~~~
ollybee
I was hoping that this would be a maintained fork of
[http://dashing.io/](http://dashing.io/)

~~~
_joel
Well, there is the official fork -
[https://github.com/SmashingDashboard/smashing](https://github.com/SmashingDashboard/smashing)
\- Last commit 20th Nov 2016

~~~
kripy
Dashing was always my vibe. Good to see it's still being worked on.

------
tlrobinson
Disclaimer: I work on Metabase.

Another open source option: Metabase
[http://www.metabase.com/](http://www.metabase.com/)

We support most SQL databases and a bunch of others, plus upcoming support for
Google Analytics.

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StavrosK
Why MongoDB for what is pretty much a front-end :( What's wrong with SQLite?

~~~
dom0
"The path of MongoDB is often the same: first the primary DB, then the
configuration store, then it's finally removed" \- (friend of mine)

~~~
wehadfun
Expand. MongoDB is finally removed? Why?

~~~
shawabawa3
I think the implication is that mongo is picked because it's "cool", and
eventually everyone realises another tool does the job better

(e.g. regular sql database/redis/sqlite/etc)

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mrkmcknz
There seems to be a plethora of these open source dashboard builder systems.

I just want to pay for a hosted version that isn't going to be $1k monthly and
require me to build "plugins" to do something that is akin to an API call.

~~~
dkural
I want it to be a $1K/m so they can stay in business and build a sustainable
thing I won't have to replace. That's still way cheaper than spending 1/4th of
an engineers time per year on an open source dashboard.

~~~
intrasight
In a business/enterprise context, why not use Power BI?

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hackcrafter
Looks like a hosted equivalent of GeckoBoard[0], which I have used
successfully for uptime and key metric boards that are displayed in common
room dedicated TV screens etc.

One key is getting decent render performance on low-spec hardware (i.e. a
Rasberry Pi). Not something you usually think about when building/evaluating a
web app, but those low-spec "boxes" _crawl_ on most modern web-sites.

Yet there shouldn't be any reason why a dashboard couldn't be rendered on
them!

I wonder how Cyclotron performs with it's JS heavy front-end on those types of
dedicated dashboard devices?

[0] [https://www.geckoboard.com/](https://www.geckoboard.com/)

------
ape4
Forgive my ignorance... what makes a dashboard different that a regular
webapp?

~~~
vomitcuddle
A dashboard is a web app displaying aggregate data - usually on something like
a digital signage display at a company's office - often includes 'vanity
metrics' like web traffic data, Git commits, social media feeds, CI builds,
etc.

~~~
jldugger
To expand upon that, it's aggregating a variety of data sources, generally via
disparate APIs, rather than creating its own database backed API.

So while most framework models are oriented around their own ORM, a dashboard
is probably better off modeling a set of translators, and providing tools for
adding new translators. Translators can take a random API, and convert into a
normalized data type the rest of the framework can understand. And a good
community will have a lot of these translators available.

Additionally, the dashboard framework can provide a variety of standard
visualizations for the translators to send normalized data. Time series,
histogram, pie chart, text, etc. And provide an intelligent layout engine for
arranging a collection of these on a screen. Dashing, for example, allows a
user to re-arrange dashlets.

tl;dr -- it _is_ a webapp, but the more limited scope allows for better
tooling and your valuable engineers can focus the more productive uses of
their time, like writing new visualizations or, more likely, new translators.

------
jenhsun
Anyone know Baidu's echarts? [http://ecomfe.github.io/echarts/index-
en.html](http://ecomfe.github.io/echarts/index-en.html)

------
fiatjaf
There is also [https://mondash.org/](https://mondash.org/), which is has a
clever API that may be very useful in some cases.

------
wiremine
Nice! Some quick feedback:

* I'd default to the "light" theme, especially if you're presenting it against dark background. It will highlight the content better. * You could use some whitespace between the widget titles and the content. The text is sliding into the graphs. * Might be nice to use more than two colors for the graph content, or at least make one of them different from black, which is also the color used used for the tables and titles.

------
dnprock
This scared me a little bit. We've been doing a similar product
[https://vida.io](https://vida.io). I think we've got a lot further with many
components and dashboards, see
[https://vida.io/explore](https://vida.io/explore). At the same time, I'm
pretty excited to see someone has similar vision about custom data
visualizations.

------
zorbash
To be honest I don't understand why should a dashboard framework need MongoDB
to display widgets from external sources.

[shameless plug] We're also building an open-source dashboards framework
[https://github.com/kittoframework/kitto](https://github.com/kittoframework/kitto)

------
mrcactu5
I like how you can change the Cascading Style Sheets pretty much on the click
of a button. I am a bit behind the time, but I do remember Square's Cube to be
good for time-series.

[https://github.com/square/cube](https://github.com/square/cube)

Those can be embedded into dashboards

------
based2
[http://zeppelin.apache.org/](http://zeppelin.apache.org/)

------
kfk
On a side note, any site like HN for data systems, BI, dashboards?

Edit. To be clear I mean forums where business intelligence, data science,
dashboard folks hang out. I work with Tableau and they have a big community, I
am looking for sites less tableau centric...

~~~
wickedgain
What do you mean exactly?

------
Redsquare
Airbnb have a decent os dash
[https://github.com/airbnb/superset/blob/master/README.md](https://github.com/airbnb/superset/blob/master/README.md)

------
_ao789
How is this different from potential alternatives like Geckoboard, Ducksboard
and all those? Is it essentially not just another one?

------
mxuribe
This seems pretty cool. Though running it as an intrAnet app is unexpected.

~~~
mwexler
Though in many corporate settings, that's where you'd expect to see it. Many
externally facing dash frameworks require too many dependencies; this one went
lighter in some ways b/c they assume that it's behind a wall and in a trusted
environment.

[http://www.cyclotron.io/faq.html](http://www.cyclotron.io/faq.html):

"Can I Use Cyclotron to Host Dashboards on the Internet?

It is not recommended to deploy Cyclotron as-is in a public setting. Cyclotron
was designed to be used in a corporate intranet environment, rather than for
public dashboards. In addition, it's possible to create malicious dashboards
using the extensibility features of Cyclotron. Allowing untrustworthy users to
create dashboards is not recommended."

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SEJeff
It _requires_ mongodb to run, eeeewwww:
[http://www.cyclotron.io/faq.html#without-
mongodb](http://www.cyclotron.io/faq.html#without-mongodb)

Not something I'd trust as a primary datastore.

------
smrtinsert
what about openmct. iirc it was a complete dashboarding tool.

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ndubuka
Nice product

------
ndubuka
Thanks for project

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omouse
I never understand why people choose MIT when they create something valuable
and don't go for AGPL or GPL.

Looks good though :D

~~~
ohstopitu
Since we are talking about licenses, is there a license that is as permissive
as MIT but one that requires you to give credit for your work?

~~~
detaro
What do you mean by "give credit"? You have to name the original author with
MIT somewhere:

<snip> _The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be
included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software._ </snip>

~~~
ohstopitu
basically, what I would like is a license that's basically like MIT...but I
would want my name + email + tool be listed in the about / licences section of
anything created / used with my tools/projects etc.

------
ambrop7
I find the name slightly disrespective of people who develop and work with
actual cyclotrons (particle accelerators). How is their application related to
cyclotrons?

------
nkg
That name may have a negative ring, as a cyclotron is also a cancer imaging
device :

[https://www.mskcc.org/blog/how-new-particle-accelerator-
will...](https://www.mskcc.org/blog/how-new-particle-accelerator-will-make-
imaging-and-treatment-more-precise)

~~~
keyboardmasher
Cyclotron:
[http://swatkats.info/encyclopedia/entries/cyclotron](http://swatkats.info/encyclopedia/entries/cyclotron)

~~~
nkg
XD

Megatron, anyone ?

