About
Visualizing metrics is an incredibly common and valuable task. Virtually every department in a business likes to leverage data when making decisions. Time and time again I’ve seen developers implement one-off solutions for automatic reporting, sometimes quick and dirty, sometimes highly polished. For example:
- A weekly email to the entire company showing the main engagement KPIs for the product.
- A weekly Slack message to a team channel showing how many alerts the on-call team member had to respond to in the previous week.
- A daily summary of sales numbers and targets.
Thanks largely to Grafana, teams are customizing real-time dashboards to always have an up-to-date view on the health of a system or the health of the business. However, there is often value in distilling a continuum of real-time metrics into a short digestible report. KPI Reporter attempts to make it easier to build such reports.
A few guiding principles that shape this project:
- It should be possible to run on-premises. It is far easier to run a reporting tool within an infrastructure due to the amount of data sinks that must be accessible. Security teams should rightly raise eyebrows when databases are exposed externally just so a reporting tool can reach in.
- It should be highly customizable. There should not be many assumptions about either layout or appearance. The shape and type of data ultimately will drive this.
- It should be possible to extend. The space of distinct user needs is massive. While the tool should aim to provide a lot of useful functionality out of the box, it will always be the case that custom extensions will be required to achieve a particular implementation. The tool should embrace this reality.