SuperMike
December 10th, 2007, 09:38 PM
Can anyone recommend a PHP-based dashboard product for Ubuntu Linux that allows me to write small gadgets to show us business intelligence information, such as number of transactions running through an application, broke out by category, etc. I've been asked to find something with fancy charts.
I think they're interested in pentaho.com, but not something requiring Java. We know PHP.
Note this is different than just charting SNMP information like one would do with Cactus or Nagios. This is about going beyond that -- letting us have gadgets we can build to show business intelligence data. For instance, how many of our customers sent in their transactions by mail, versus sent by web, etc. We track these things in database tables but don't have a handy web interface for managers to visualize it in pretty charts and see trends over time.
And we need the system such that we have roles if possible where certain managers can see certain gadgets only, while others can see much more. (There's office politics -- that's why. Some managers may not understand that it's okay to have a set of alerts on some servers at certain times of the day.)
As for programming language, we know PHP, HTML, and Javascript. We can even use server-side Javascript (a cool new thing). But we want to avoid Java at all costs because we don't have a lot of investment in that.
Another route, perhaps, is that the portal/gadget/dashboard platform lets us build gadgets with a non-programming interface, and just point at XML outputs from some job that runs somewhere. That permits me to get our Dev team to just build the output in any programming language and the Dashboard aggregates it into pretty charts.
Note -- given the right product, we would actually $$PAY$$ handsomely for this and for its tech support contract, so please consider that.
Please also note that I have a time-limit on how long I can research this.
I think they're interested in pentaho.com, but not something requiring Java. We know PHP.
Note this is different than just charting SNMP information like one would do with Cactus or Nagios. This is about going beyond that -- letting us have gadgets we can build to show business intelligence data. For instance, how many of our customers sent in their transactions by mail, versus sent by web, etc. We track these things in database tables but don't have a handy web interface for managers to visualize it in pretty charts and see trends over time.
And we need the system such that we have roles if possible where certain managers can see certain gadgets only, while others can see much more. (There's office politics -- that's why. Some managers may not understand that it's okay to have a set of alerts on some servers at certain times of the day.)
As for programming language, we know PHP, HTML, and Javascript. We can even use server-side Javascript (a cool new thing). But we want to avoid Java at all costs because we don't have a lot of investment in that.
Another route, perhaps, is that the portal/gadget/dashboard platform lets us build gadgets with a non-programming interface, and just point at XML outputs from some job that runs somewhere. That permits me to get our Dev team to just build the output in any programming language and the Dashboard aggregates it into pretty charts.
Note -- given the right product, we would actually $$PAY$$ handsomely for this and for its tech support contract, so please consider that.
Please also note that I have a time-limit on how long I can research this.