Creating a Key Performance Indicators Dashboard

A common use of dashboards is to display KPIs or "Key Performance Indicators". A KPI is often single value, or sometimes a sequence of values, which conveys some critical facts about the way a process if operating. Typically, a KPI gives you "the one thing you need to see" in order to know if a process or business is healthy or not.

This page will show you three different ways to create a KPI dashboard indicator using InetSoft.

1. Create a KPI by using Data Mashup

The InetSoft data mashup tool is called a Data Worksheet. You can use this tool to do all kinds of joins, filters, and other transformations on your data. In this case, we will calculate a 'Total Sales' KPI in the Data Worksheet. To do this, add a query as a data block to the Data Worksheet, as shown below.

example of creating a KPI dashboard

To create a KPI representing the Total Sales, press the Group and Aggregate button, and select Total as the Aggregate field.


The result is a data block that returns only the summed Total Sales. You can now use this KPI in a dashboard or report.


The result is a data block that returns only the summed Total Sales. You can now use this KPI in a dashboard or report.


2. Add a KPI When You Create a Dashboard

It is easy to create different kinds of KPI displays when you build a dashboard in Visual Composer. The quickest way to do this is to drag a Text or Gauge component into the dashboard, and then drag the desired measure onto the component. This will display the aggregated measure as a KPI using the selected component, as shown below.


This is the most common method of adding KPIs to a dashboard.

3. Create a KPI in a Deployed Dashboard

A dashboard user can also create a KPI using the Date Comparison feature in a deployed dashboard, without using Visual Composer. To do this, simply open the Date Comparison feature for a Chart or Crosstab.


Select a desired date comparison, for example a comparison that displays the % change from year to year.


The resulting chart now displays the desired KPI, % change from year to year. You can easily make changes to the date comparison to display a wide variety of KPIs based on different date ranges and granularities.