Best framework for a dev team's internal metrics site?

June 16, 2016 6:31 AM

I manage multiple software teams and would like to create a cool web dashboard (for wall screens) that radiates useful team info: build status, test run results, food truck schedule, number of live customers ... whatever. What is a simple set of tools for cobbling this together?

Details: I am a manager with 20 years coding experience but haven't written any code in a year. I haven't used MVC really, or any hot client frameworks like Angular. But I'm a quick study. Team uses C#, Bootstrap, cloud hosting. Requirements:

* consume data from web services to make fancy charts (d3/dc.js?)
* some server-side code to handle providers with no REST APIs - db queries, manually updated stats, etc.
* ideally, a dashboard container that already has the concept of tiling/widgets/auto updates.
* Some of the data sources: TeamCity (REST), TFS 2013, Confluence, Slack, iCal (food trucks!!).
* Ideally free (we do already have access to Telerik Kendo)

This will be a big help to the teams and give me a chance to brush up on my skills. Thanks in advance!

posted by freecellwizard to Computers & Internet (9 answers total)

It's not free if you index over 500MB, but you can do all of this with Splunk.
posted by kris.reiss at 7:35 AM on June 16, 2016

I use Dashing for this. Looks like it's just recently gone out of maintenance, but for an internal dashboard I'd still recommend it. Comes with nice-looking basic charts and you could plug in fancier ones if you wanted. You build little data-fetching plugins in Ruby for it so the data can come from anywhere.

I have a couple of wall screens with it and it's been immensely helpful.
posted by pocams at 7:48 AM on June 16, 2016

Response by poster: I actually tried Dashing a while back (project was on the back burner) and got a POC going in like a day despite no prior knowledge of node.js or Ruby. I'm sure it was spaghetti code but I liked how it looked. So that's definitely an option.

Someone internally here just this moment recommended Keen (https://keen.io/) which looks like it's free for small numbers of events (50,000/mo.). It looks pretty swanky. Anyone tried that?
posted by freecellwizard at 8:31 AM on June 16, 2016

If you are in a hurry R Shiny Dashboard requires very minimal code (in R).... downside is limited flexibility.
posted by miyabo at 9:06 AM on June 16, 2016

We used geckoboard, which was dead simple and integrated with things like GA and other common tools.
posted by ch1x0r at 7:13 PM on June 16, 2016

We use granite / grafana for the dashboards and riemann to collect metric data from the systems we are reporting on
posted by askmehow at 4:58 AM on June 17, 2016

Best answer: We used Dashing for a bit too, but not enough of us had Ruby/CoffeeScript experience to make it generally useful/reworkable (we're an embedded C shop, mostly). We've got on much better with Atlasboard, which is just JS and Node and relatively basic stuff.
posted by PeteTheHair at 5:43 AM on June 17, 2016

Response by poster: Thanks everyone. I love Atlassian stuff so I may give Atlasboard a whirl. I like the idea of keeping it simple (js/node) and it matches well with the skill set of folks around here. We'll see how it goes!
posted by freecellwizard at 8:14 AM on June 17, 2016

Response by poster: In case anyone comes back to this question, I did use Atlasboard and once I puttered around a bit found it pretty helpful in that it handles refreshing gadgets, nice look and feel, and multiple dashboards. I did have to write my own widgets, often cribbing from others' work. Before I left that job, I wrote 3 or 4 widgets that pull build and test info from TeamCity, and a better version of one I found online that rotates between dashboards on a timer. The code isn't great but it's documented, so memail me if you think it may be useful and I can put it on Github or something.
posted by freecellwizard at 10:22 AM on November 27, 2016 [1 favorite]