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.
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.