Ask HN: Anyone Familiar with Building Analytic Dashboards?

Where are you getting hung up?

I have built a fair number of analytic dashboards for a variety of clients. Google Analytics is pretty easy to export data from and integrate to overall. Social is a little more of a pain depending on the source and what you are trying to measure.

Overall I find the hardest part is selecting the metrics to communicate to the client/user so you are providing the most value without noise. Creating the dashboard(s) is usually the easy part, definition and analysis are where you show the clients/users why you are special.

I would suggest a few things. There are 3 presentations / blog posts that are must reads for this sort of thing... Measure Anything, Measure Everything[1] Metrics Driven Engineering[2] Metrics, Metrics, Everywhere[3]

The most common tool used for this is graphite[4]. Yelp also wrote their own which is nice called Firefly[5]. If you go with graphite like most big companies do, I would strongly suggest looking at graphene[6], gdash[7], giraffe[8], tasseo[9], or cubism[10] dashboard frontends. Graphite has a lot of "devops" community around it.

This should be enough to get you started :)

[1] http://codeascraft.etsy.com/2011/02/15/measure-anything-meas... [2] http://www.slideshare.net/mikebrittain/metricsdriven-enginee... [3] http://pivotallabs.com/139-metrics-metrics-everywhere/ [4] http://graphite.wikidot.com/ [5] https://github.com/Yelp/Firefly [6] http://jondot.github.com/graphene/ [7] http://www.devco.net/archives/2011/10/08/gdash-graphite-dash... [8] https://github.com/kenhub/giraffe [9] https://github.com/obfuscurity/tasseo [10] http://square.github.com/cubism/