

Show HN: Beautiful real-time dashboards with FnordMetric - finnomenon
http://fnordmetric.io/?yc=true

======
saosebastiao
I'm gonna participate in the time-honored HN tradition of being a Debbie
Downer.

Dashboards suck. Not because they are inherently bad, but because of the
return on investment. There are two types:

1) The dashboards that are created using blood sweat and tears...paying
attention to every possible detail, trying to maximize information conveyed
per square millimeter. These dashboards are works of art and are incredibly
interesting when done right, but involve thousands of hours of trained
developer time to get to this point. They exist for the explicit purpose of
facilitating decision making procedures. And yet, in all my experience
building them, the time spent maximizing information conveyed per square
millimeter is a complete and utter waste, because the decisions that are
facilitated by the information can, for the most part, be trivially automated
and optimized using the same data sets and the same analysis that was used to
create the graphic.

2) Dashboards that, due to some software package that eases their design, are
incredibly easy to create...and completely uninformative. The developers of
these packages think their software is great because it makes the creation of
pretty graphs easy, but they leave the job of making the graphs informative up
to the user. But making a graph informative is the hardest part! The myriad
tweaks that are necessary to increase information density either do not exist,
or they are incomplete hacks that are only possible due to a bug that might be
fixed soon.

I believe that the only reason they exist is to satisfy the egos of executives
and micromanagers. They believe that if they have all the data at their
fingertips, they can command and execute with perfection. These are the people
who think you are there for one reason only: "Give me the data and I will tell
you what to do". What they fail to realize is that by the time the data has
been extracted, transformed, and visualized, the developer understands the
data and its implications way better than anyone who only sees the high level
summaries.

FnordMetric has its market, and it looks like it will do very well in this
niche. But it won't make your business any better. If you want software that
makes your business better, look for optimization software (think Optimizely,
Lokad, or my personal favorite, Gurobi)...and then empower your devs to
programatically make the data-driven decisions for you.

------
xal
Also, check out Dashing at <http://shopify.github.com/dashing/> which we
released at Shopify. It's optimized to run on your extra laptop screen via
[https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/looking-
glass/id584492076?mt...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/looking-
glass/id584492076?mt=12) or on your Samsung SmartTV ( it supports switching
dashboards via tv remote )

------
alexmic
There have been quite a few submissions about this project:
[http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=fnordmetric](http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=fnordmetric)

------
uvince
Very pretty. I like how you can host it/hack it. I will definitely give it a
try. We have a 70" I try and display real-time metrics on, and praise from
customers, winning A/B tests, etc.

For a hosted alternative, I've been using <https://www.leftronic.com/> for a
project at work and have been really impressed with their built-in widgets and
their support is A+. When I had trouble uploading spreadsheets of data they
fixed me right up.

~~~
roryokane
I used Leftronic to create a dashboard at a previous company. The built-in
widgets were not as flexible as I’d have liked but good enough, and it was
pretty convenient to move widgets and add new ones. We open-sourced our code
to upload custom data to the dashboard, so you can see what using the API
looks like: <https://github.com/NeomindLabs/neomind-dashboard-public>

------
paulasmuth
Project on Github: <https://github.com/paulasmuth/fnordmetric>

------
radiospiel
I really like that one. Now if someone could fix this issue we could even
deploy it on heroku again:
<https://github.com/paulasmuth/fnordmetric/issues/90>

~~~
sleepyhead
By "someone should fix this issue" you mean "Heroku should add web-socket
support". And they are.

------
up_and_up
Here is a nice free screencast on FnordMetric by Ryan Bates:
<http://railscasts.com/episodes/378-fnordmetric>

Worth checking out.

------
plasma
Beautiful graphs.

I really wanted this to work for me months ago when it was first posted on HN,
but ran into trouble getting it setup.

Will definitely re-visit - thank you!

------
tonyarkles
I'm glad this got an update. I tried using it a few weeks ago and a few things
seemed broken. Glad it's had new life breathed into it. The HTML5 stuff looks
especially cool!

